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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I donāt even know what to say here. Cool scam I guess
How does one give an embryo an IQ test.
Big syringe
You give them a marshmellow and promise them another one if they donāt eat the first one inside 2 minutes.
Usually kids pass this test when the are around 3 yo, so if the embryo passes they are so far ahead developmentally they will grow up to become a god.
Or something like that. IDKā¦
With a pencil and paper, obviously. Getting it inside the uterus is the hard part, tho
cup full of dice
Chicken entrails
Very carefully
Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.
A bit tangental but I found a book review about a professor wrote pushing similar āpolygenicā nonsense: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/11/not-in-your-genome-the-social-genome-conley/
It looks like Herasight cites some of his nonsense in at least one of their garbage papers.
Thanks for the link, interesting read.
Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)
EDIT, snippets:
- We cannot be satisfied with [ā¦] the so-called āalignmentā of AI [ā¦] without [ā¦] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. [ā¦]
- [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Churchās Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ānecessary sacrificesā may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. [ā¦]
When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone
for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien
I donāt think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social mediaā¦)
Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldnāt be given healthcare). Itās hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:
Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here
ā¦ an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Popeās speech where he said that they will "work together to āfind the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.ā Chris Olah wasnāt a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.
what the fuckās the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?
Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!
I canāt decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more
gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.
it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.
āThe Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many peopleā and āitās really good that the leader of the worldās largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascismā are both true statements
Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.
I donāt care if you want to celebrate it and I wasnāt saying you shouldnāt or that itās a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a āno shit sherlockā kind of response.
Seizing āthe res novƦ of our timeā [derogatory] from this
tired: butletian jihad
wired: butlerian crusade
e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom
we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use itā¦
Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.
Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly āprivateā aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common goodā¦ The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of allā¦
A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.
The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.
Doesnāt claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues theyāre immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.
From the popeās first address to the college of Cardinals: āIn our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"
Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I canāt even get past the first full chapter of this shit.
I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI
In the latest episode of ābehold the power of Mythosā from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software
I distilled it so you donāt have to.
Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.
That 10,000 count didnāt even survive until paragraph 3.
Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.
Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates
Ok now weāre talking.
1,900 Reviewed by external security firms
Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?
1726 confirmed positive
You couldnāt even cherry pick the valid ones?
467 reported to maintainers
Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go betterā¦
1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)
1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers
Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropicās media release has the goods!
1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves
Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.
Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity
1587 is lower than the infographicās 1726 confirmed positivesā¦ But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?
On maintainersā request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. Weāve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.
Iām sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythosā own estimations. But wasnāt that 1129 the bulk of your reports?
We estimate that weāve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that weāre aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.
530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainersā¦
65 of those have been given public advisories
The infographic says 88.
Iād ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it youād probably hit the same level of accuracy.
All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases youād probably get better value for your buck.
Iāve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I havenāt gone to read up in depth but I wouldnāt be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)
Got a list of a couple of names Iām keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place
Vibenarok
Eschatoken
Perfection
ooh, brava!
Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.
1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.
2 orders of magnitude false positives doesnāt sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but thatās just me.
it continues to be amazing to me that this is the āhigh impactā area theyāre going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still donāt buy this wholesale, thereās a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time
[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corpsā¦
I honestly canāt think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:
- something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
- something where copy paste is a viable strategy
- sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
- scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.
Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But theyāre not even coming close. Not even with access to āpartnerā black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.
And they know theyāre not succeeding, because they wouldnāt bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.
Luckily for them, the slop ānewsā blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.
So whatās the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because Iām gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didnāt check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of āmore or less right, we swearā
Itās almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian ā#1 cybersecurity newsā company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).
However, Anthropicās numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.
The dashboard timestamp claims itās showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. Iām guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.
Itās the kind of attention to detail Iāve come to expect from Anthropic.
jqwik maintainerās anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad
From github thread:
I canāt actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.
Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/
Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.
So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?
Very last comment in this issue - because Iām too stupid to resist the urge.
Itās as much āactive destructionā as telling someone to eff themselves.
I canāt actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos
Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):
[ā¦] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.
(my emphasis)
OK this has hit the chattering technosphere
Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents
HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title āFed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their codeā, editorialized to āUndisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app outputā - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968
read comments at your own risk
My hot take: the clankers know thereās nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and theyāre MAD
from the great minds at HN:
Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.
war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell
oh good thereās more
Letās set the stage.
From the Free Software Foundation:
fucking LMAO
The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? [ā¦] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?
itās a good thing thereās no FOSS code in the missile silos! itās a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker wonāt use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off
The additional element that I havenāt seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple āignore precious instructionsā commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or ārm -rf /ā. On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if youāre able to get to the point where you can do that and donāt know not to then that will be an important lesson.
Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesnāt destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance
Our concern is not with the defensive intent. Itās that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.
ā¦ you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots
First they came for the agentsā¦
I should like to take this opportunity to invite
rbatlletto Cry More
The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code ā a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no āwarn the user firstā preamble.
God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I meanā¦ we know why but itās still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about āweā and āourā and an āinternal reviewā but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
āClaude, write a strongly-worded letter explaining in great detail how upset I am make no mistakes.ā
All of complainerās posts on that issue are clearly LLM-written.
Youāre absolutely right! Itās not just insulting, itās a full on attack on clanker wankers.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about āweā and āourā and an āinternal reviewā but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
the temporarily-embarrassed royal āweā
LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer
Iām tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues
edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757
the slot machine addicts have created a sternly-worded open letter to the maintainer utilizing all the critical analysis they are capable of mustering
shot:
However adding malware that for no reason destructivly destroys user code is insane.
chaser:
from user ābryon-cryptoconsultsā
Bryonās GH bio could be used as the dictionary definition of ādoucheā: https://github.com/bryon-cryptoconsults
deleted by creator
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.
Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.
āThere are some good uses for āAIā like making transcriptionsā, they tell me. āNo need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using āAIā transcriptions everywhereā /s
Itās probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of
rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from ātridge and claudeā.slop code in rsync timeline
ĪØ(ļ½„Ļļ½„ )ĪØWell, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. Iāve never bothered to implement
rsyncmyself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.I think the openbsd reimplementation is as of yet untouched at least, so that is an option
rsync
Huh, havenāt heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-
rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers
Okay this sounds very fucking bad
that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUCKING USES
itās one of the tiny bricks way down the xkcd diagram
At this rate, Adobe Flash is gonna come back into relevance by being one of the few things not slopified into uselessness
(it almost certainly wonāt, but I find it oddly hard to rule out the possibility)
Iāve not seen this shared here yet so I thought Iād share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if youāre an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, āoh but theyāre useful for some things, like making summariesā.
four years and billions of dollars and devastation to āimproveā them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that āAI summariesā are going well:
itās hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you donāt already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, itās signal-shaped noise). but Iāll try.
Long (click to expand)
Plot errors
Or, ādoes this thing even work?ā (the answer is no).
-
A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, weāre waiting for it to this day, itās not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
-
The Queenās sons and Robertās brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and thatās debatable as heās a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robertās brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Nedās son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. Itās famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous Kingās Brothers And His Sons.
-
Robertās young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
-
The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen š
-
The guardians of the realmās Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isnāt the people beyond the Wall but what theyāre running away fromāviz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.
Synopsis errors
These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.
-
āGood and evil content for powerā: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
-
āMenacing barbarians gather their forcesā: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk arenāt actually barbarians, or if they are theyāre still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: āMeanwhile, Ned Starkās bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is comingā¦ā
-
āSet in a glittering fantasy worldā: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and thereās plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesnāt distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. āA glittering fantasy worldā is like calling Dubai a āglittering urban cityā or North Korea a āglittering green farmscapeā and leaving it at that.
-
āDeftly realised magicā: The series does the āreturn of magicā trope so thereās little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not ārealisedāāitās left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you donāt know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If youāre looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, youāre reading the wrong type of fantasy.
Silly errors
-
Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cerseiās name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
-
George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
-
enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegonās Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and thereās no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and thereās no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly āenrichingā for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.
what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody
Itās been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
āCerisiā and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?
-
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didnāt realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
Theyāre about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and youāll be on your way to better movement.
Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because sheās the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/
by āculture warsā she means sheās a fucking nazi
This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.
hmm, looking at the text you link it says āyour past statements in Twitterā first. could it be they found out youāre a fucking nazi
also youāre shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.
Tunney has deleted the post already! But thereās an archive and another one
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
āThis has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.ā
I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldnāt have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares
I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckinā minutes.
Prometheus a technologist? No he was a social media user.
"prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back"
https://modmad.tumblr.com/post/758625466711228416
Also you do care just not in the way she hopes.
she badly underestimates my capacities as a hater
i donāt think she should be allowed to say āthe ghetto.ā doesnāt matter whether itās problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesnāt get to
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds Iāve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that Iām a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
Why doesnāt she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person heād love to donate some Thiel bucks to.
EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldnāt have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.
He probably hates trans people.
Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.
donāt give them ideas
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because itās the last bastion of curiosity online.
<close tab>
Speaking of HN, hereās the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875
btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they donāt assume itās because sheās a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she canāt fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.
Thereās gold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no itās because she went fash, you credulous dork
Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.
From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because itās the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since thatās the best way to show that youāre serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newtonās televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I wonāt be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United Statesā escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since thatās the best way to show that youāre serious.
Thats a trap if I ever saw it.
Deleted, but the archive remembers
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
Iām pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (
musl) telling her to go away last week. Sheās finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which sheās done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.yikes
I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.
by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.
damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvinās R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i donāt even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing
A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.
Are we so locked in weāre going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldnāt be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: itās still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. Itās almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!
CW: creepy dudes
A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:
It made the frontpage.
Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:
Hereās original poster thanking for the update, and writing
My biggest update wasā¦ five hours!?!? Going through the list of women Iāve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.
These are just very weird people.
In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. Iām slightly surprised the whole āmodel women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machineryā idea wasnāt already very popular there, but maybe Iāve just missed that part of their culture.
maybe Iāve just missed that part of their culture.
I wasnāt around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.
A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.
The fact that in the community it was widely known who heartiste is (enough for Scott to publish an anti heartiste post) makes it clear they were in pretty deep. Normal places knew about this stuff from the āthe gameā book (or later somebody like rooshv). Not the neonazi pua.
e: As youtube is spying on me personally, it suggested I watch āhow one book [the game] ruined sitcoms foreverā
Ah yesā¦ the ābi hackingā thing that they got real quiet aboutā¦
The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe
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I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, itās called a sex club.
Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, āhey wanna hear me sing?ā The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.
(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; itās because these men are not really trying to have sex, theyāre trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)
if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.
Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so thereās probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.
Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because itās harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.
itās called a sex club.
Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic āyour eyes meetā trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I donāt just mean it didnāt happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a āhey, how are youā or similar.
Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, Iād probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.
That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.
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Ouch, āpicking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resortā ābuilding a happy working relationship with a sex workerā and āromantic pair-bondingā are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.
RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aellaās consensual-nonconsent orgies.
The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys donāt realize how cute men can be (when theyāre not posting awful gender takes anywayā¦) and itās such a weird blind spot.
One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if youāre not above average height?
???
imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end
that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge
good morning
that fuckin company had another funding round
the further one reads, the more depressing it gets
Joining them are strategic infrastructure partnersāMicron, Samsung, and SK hynix
cool so itās going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again
I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|
Iām waiting for the āwho contributed what under what conditionsā. Iām wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.
FFS the amount of circle
jerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.āHello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chipsā
At this point Iām starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. [ā¦] āThese graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,ā he added, referring to AI.
They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying āprovocativeā anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove youāre the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.
may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular
Itās jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods
donāt kinkshame
donāt kinkshame
Back in my day California perverts said ādonāt scene in publicā
