The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
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 soo 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.)
.Previously, on Awful, Gutsick Gibbon spent an hour ripping apart T. Bealeās (VDās) anti-evolution book. She was still angry though, so she got her prior collaborator and four friends to join her for a complete dissection of VDās bullshit claims. Content warning for literally everything awful we discuss here, including sex crimes, neo-Nazis, Silicon Valley bullshit, and remarkably bad arithmetic. My choice sneer is her chosen video title, āSix Scientists Roast One Racist Loser (Heartwarming) (Four Hours) (Hopecore)ā. GGās requested that we not give VD any attention other than reminding him that heās such a pathetic loser that even white nationalists disavow him as too boring and insipid, so Iām not posting this to a top-level topic, but Iām getting a lot of household chores done while listening to it in the background and maybe you will too.
https://sfstandard.com/2026/10/13/openai-engineer-arrested-alleged-bugging-executive-conference-room/ h/t Naked Capitalism
A chatbot account tied to Alfozanās spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to ābuild a continuous audio recorderā and āencrypt the SD card,ā prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
lol asking ChatGPT how to bug OpenAI from your wifeās account.
How much slop is in Linux now? Youāre no longer allowed to know, so its probably all slop
(why did I jump ship to Linux at this exact moment)
For copyright purposes, all patches must be substantially human-written. However, it seems that most patches are now prepared with chatbot assistance, so that effectively means that people are required to be psychotic centaurs in order to keep up with review demand. Thereās an LWN secret link from the documentation lieutenant which summarizes the linked LKML thread. My former lieutenant, in the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem, is apparently having a bad time:
Airlie asked his sub-maintainers; most of them identified him as the biggest pain point. More seriously, it was that the DRM subsystem is still seeing too many regressions. There is a push within the subsystem to move development to GitLab in order to use its CI features; he is not standing in the way because he wants to see how it turns out.
This is a more systemic problem than one might expect, because DRM (and DRI, Direct Rendering Infrastructure) are partially shared between Linux and the BSDs. This subsystem has creaked along under the weight of corporate expectations for decades, mostly fueled by a kind of quiet sponsorship of young university folks from GPU vendors along with outsourced drivers produced behind corporate privacy and thrown over the wall. Every vendor, even our eternal nemesis nVidia, has made repeated concessions in order to try to figure out the maintainer burden, but it seems that we are still dependent on Airlieās stoutness and willingness to get shouted at by Torvalds.
More news about the character dot ai bankruptcy: as it turns out, the true economics of the company are disastrous. At their peak, their revenue was around $1M a month while their AI compute expenses alone were $14M a month! Their total expenses in 2025 were around $18.5M a month before counting legal fees. All of this is for a pure text-based low power LLM (none of the āreasoningā business).
Before AI boosters crow about how much cheaper AI is currently, they tried every trick in the book to enshittify: open models, ads, usage limits, etc. This allowed them to cut down their losses to a mere $9M a month.
Surely this is all one big exception, everyone else in the AI bubble is doing just fine!
@lagrangeinterpolator :thisisfine: :trashfire: @BlueMonday1984
I havenāt really kept up, but it looks like Characterās business model was still focused on NSFW content. If so, then this is also a disaster for the industry at large, since NSFW content is one of the few genuine money-printers for chatbot and image-generation services; people really do want thousands of iterations of the same fantasy, slightly changed in order to stay engaging, and Character was highly recommended as a source of affordable slop. (Examples of unaffordability include the rampant free-tier abuse on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok; Iām assuming that customers are willing to open their wallets at least a little. In general, the porn industry turns a profit, so I do think that people will pay for porn.)
My prior estimate (previously, on Awful and on Lobsters) was that token generation was subsidized to the tune of an effective 80-90% discount; this looks to be more in the 90-95% range. For contrast, consider chatbot-booster Willisonās belief, in reply above, that Chinese labs will magically produce a five-fold improvement in token production; this still would be between two to four times slower than needed to turn a profit for Character.
How you look at āmy company pays $14 for every $ from the userā and not like, idk, stop, seek help, change your job, name, and address, is completely beyond me.
I mean, the founders literally did that, Google hired them back at a 2.8 billion dollar premium for some reason.
You assume that the VCs will keep you alive a little longer as a honeypot to gather more plaintext blackmail material and private information and keep preparing to sell out to Facebook
Question: anyone has a link to a good primer on the rationalists and especially how that whole environment influences/interacts with the large AI companies like Anthropic?
I need something to bring some ppl I know up to speed on this bc when they ask me āwait, what do you mean when you say that Silicone Valley turned into an AI cult with orgiesā I just stare into space overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task ahead of me.
What type of documentation are you looking for? The big picture is easily googleable and wikipediable: EY got a few of the super-rich excited enough about doomer drama to bankroll the founding of OpenAI, whose governing body was mostly EAs (until the Altman-Nadella counter-coup) while Anthropic were the people who bailed because they though OAI werenāt serious enough about alignment, and suddenly getting dicked in a rationalist
compoundgroup house has immense career implications in the burgeoning AI sector.Also terms like AGI, ASI, AI alignment, existential risk et al started out as lesswrong shibboleths, and so-called alignment research is almost completely a rationalist circlejerk.
Pinning the EA/rats down as a cult is where it gets murkier because itās mostly them telling on themselves in social media and blog post implications, like how they foster a culture of zero personal boundaries, ingroup overdependence and rigid hierarchies stratified around claimed IQ and proximity to the Great Work of not messing up the robot god incantation that ends the world.
You could do worse than the Behind the Bastards episode on the Zizians, mostly because unlike Leverage or MAPLE who kind of did their own thing but with rationalist funding and human capital, the Zizians can be fairly described as what happens if you actually take the more esoteric aspects of rationalism seriously.
Also, the really powerful people keep the details mercifully secret. My elevator pitch is āremember how the exec team at FTX were living in a penthouse apartment, sleeping together, and posting harem fantasies? People who have met them the Rationalists and AI company staff live like that.ā
AI safety is mostly a sex cult
the guy who posted this is also a singularity fanatic, but this is a good enough summary
Itās a catchy summary because he leans into the weird sex stuff instead of say the cosmism aspect, but the writer is a knob who doesnāt like EA/rats for basically the same reasons as Peter Thiel, so take him with a grain of salt.
Heās also likened anti-data center activism to jewish pogroms and believes that AI resentment can be summed up as ācuring cancer is less important than my job satisfactionā.
There is always RationalWiki but its not really equipped to deal with the polycule and abuse of sexual power stuff (or all the giant institutiions taking Internet cranks seriously). https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page
I was just listening to an interview with Emile Torres, itās an hour long but it is on the topic youāre asking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jt508VjX2H8
Unconfirmed rumor says that a Swedish streaming service had to postpone the premiere of a new game show season because an āAI agentā deleted the completed cut of the show.
Via SVT: https://www.svt.se/kultur/tekniskt-haveri-tv4-skjuter-upp-realitysatsning
References Aftonbladet: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/31oE8A/the-challenge-sverige-raderad-av-ai-bara-veckor-innan-premiaren
The streaming service (TV4) says itās a ātechnical issueā (the Swedish term āhaveriā is used for everything from a computer system crash to an airplane crash).
a nsfw to start wednesday, what if the billionaires all suddenly exploded
Lets spend 500 Billion tokens on reverse engineering an unspecified first person shooter. You ask how our agents communicate with each other? Obviously via a fucking Discord channel because that makes sense.
I think it was modern warfare 2 but they redacted all explicit references because activision or whoever was starting to make annoyed legal noises.
The insistence on using number of functions copied as a metric is weird, like of course a port isnāt going to be a function-to-function translation, programming languages are never a 1-1 match with each other thatās kind of the point of having more than one.
What we needed was an automated check that tells agents whether a reconstructed function matches the original. It should verify identical semantics. A simple PASS or FAIL signal would be enough and the agent can figure out on its own whatās wrong.
Uh, sure.
Also a lot of their recommendations come of as no-duh, like pressing the compact conversation button early to reduce tokens or using a common specification document across LLM instances to keep them more coordinated, how novel, are you kidding me.
Another one of their recommendations is that fixing stuff causes garbage to accumulate, so if something isnāt working out you are better off starting from scratch, because tokens are cheap now! You just need to be doing the equivalent of maxing out dadās credit cards by using multiple private subscriptions in tandem, and I guess also make sure to time your dev cycle to coincide with the two major LLM vendors having a money burning competition on their way to an IPO.
Finally thereās a whole hypecycle going on currently that this feeds into, that makes headline readers think that LLMs can convert binaries right back into code now, when they are actually using an MCP to control existing decompilation software which is so far from the same thing.
āYes I did it. No you canāt see the workā
Via Kevin Bird (who has taken on the Rationalists before) a substack taking down Jordan Lasker/CrƩmieux Recueil
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently theyāre about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since thereās no centralized point to shut offāthough it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evaluations, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as āfeasibleā.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
I too have seen the documentary āMaximum Overdriveā
I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really wonāt let this botnet thing go. Itās so desperate & ridiculous.
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9B parameter models are so weak that theyāre essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
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Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
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Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. Itās simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
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Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware canāt get in.
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Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
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Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropicās models, not open-weight ones.
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Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
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Iām pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because itās eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that itās impossible to believe itās being done in good faith.
What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one š
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I canāt decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, theyāve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam heās managed to foster. Heāll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
The presence of billions of dollars under anyoneās control destroys anyoneās brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.
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Itās funny how theyāre twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
What fullsquare said, theyāve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.
but it has to work, it was foretold in ai in a box prophecy
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
ratsā best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
And yet so much less plausible than ādiamondoid nanobacteriaā or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
i mean thatās why we all are here, the problem is that they have thielās money and white house advisors
And yet so much less plausible than ādiamondoid nanobacteriaā
drexler is a hack and yudās nanobots canāt grow, canāt divide (theyāre made from stiff material), canāt self-repair (itās one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and thatās before you look too closely, so i wouldnāt say that because iot devices at least arenāt forbidden by known laws of physics
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A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved
Starts off with some good sneers:
Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ā Havenāt written code in ages ā Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ā Have a low bar for what good looks like ā Donāt care about quality or NFR ā Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ā Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them
But the author canāt get over their AI-centrism:
Instead of following other peopleās advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please donāt fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.
New Baldur Bjarnason: Itās not our job to fix our employers
As a note, Baldur dedicates much of the first half to how general sentiment has shifted against the tech industry over the past decade.
New Odium Symposium. We go through an episode of Loveline, a once wildly popular call-in radio show, then look at where its hosts Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew ended up.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/26-chudline-with-172120239 or www.odiumsymposium.com for all the usual rss sources
Character.AI files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell some assets for $20 million
At one point āvaluedā at 2.5B, so that sale is 99%+ discount, even charitably assuming 100M sale of it all itās still 96% discount
thank god. horrid, parasocial site
itās not shutting down so far, and if anyone buys that part it will remain up
please let nobody buy it and have it shut down. itās arguably the patient zero of ai psychosis
Couldnāt happen to a nicer bunch of people. Shame theyāre probably all made and siphoned off life-changing amounts of money before this happened. I guess we can always hope they take up smoking because AI is going to cure cancer.
Also notable for being the first to get a kid killed by AI suicide encouragement. Burn it to the ground and make teeth fillings from the slag.
Bankruptcy means theyāre not going to be paying out damages for all the AI Psychosis they caused.
They looking to get off the hook before all the class action lawsuits pile up?
or maybe they genuinely ran out of vc money
Wonder who gets all the plaintext logs from all their victims
not done yet
Under this āprocess, Disneyās bid would set a baseline offer while allowing competing bidders to submit higher bids, and the company expects āthe sale process to conclude by late November or āearly December 2026.
perhaps them, and maybe these are linked to identities of users
This is sad news, as companies are not alive, this means there is no new public toilet.
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