3d ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 soo 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.)

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So I picked up Bender and Hanna's new book just now at the bookseller's and saw four other books dragging AI.
Feeling very bullish on sneer futures.
- Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we've been stacking sneers for a while.

"apparently Elon's gotten so mad about Grok not answering questions about Afrikaners the way he wants, xAI's now somehow managed to put it into some kind of hyper-Afriforum mode where it thinks every question is about farm murders or the song "Kill the Boer" ALT"
Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (I'm already half assuming they don't have proper backups).
E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, don't go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.

Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that's being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.

There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3
- I know AGI is real because it keeps intercepting my shipments of, uh, "enhancement" gummies I ordered from an ad on Pornhub and replacing them with plain old gummy bears. The Basilisk is trying to emasculate me!
- Do you like SCP foundation content? There is an SCP directly inspired by Eliezer and lesswrong. It's kind of wordy and long. And in the discussion the author waffled on owning that it was a mockery of Eliezer.

New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.

as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy that’s developed
"accenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rights"
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
"accenture were desperately looking to find someone who'd take on the deal for the GPUs they'd bought, and thank fuck they found telstra"
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it won't
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
"and the wider industry" ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
“I always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. It’s like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,” said Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer.
“We need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So that’s what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.”
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade would've been jealous

LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridman's snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.
The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous
- There are only so many Rogans and Fridmans
  The dumbest motherfuckers imaginable, you mean? There are lots of then
  
  As a famous swindler once said, there's a sucker born every minute.
- For the purpose of this post, “getting famous” means “building a large, general (primarily online) audience of people who agree with/support you”.
  Finally a usage for those AI bots. Silo LW, bot audience it, and problem solved
  
  Truman Show As A Service
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Geoffrey Hinton, Paul Cristiano, Ilya Sustkever
  One of those names is not like the others.
  
  What do you mean? I think they all went to highschool.

Not sure if satire. https://carebestie.com/
- Personal rule of thumb: all autoplag is serious until proven satire.

everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
- Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
  
  Personally I’d choose bitconnect. Bitconneeeeeeeeect!!!
- you must understand
  Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
  All the eyeballs
- I suspect Adam was just getting a bit desperate for money. He hasn't done anything significant since his Adam Ruins Everything days and his pivot to somewhat lefty-union guy on youtube can't be bringing all that much advertising money.
  Unfortunately he's discovering that reputation is very easy to lose when endorsing cryptobros.
  
  "just"?
  "unfortunately"?
  that's a hell of a lot of leeway being extended for what is very easily demonstrably credulous PR-washing
- I don't think I ever had a vibe-check as successful as this, literally never heard about the guy, said he needs to be shoved into a locker based on vibes, an hour later he searches for his own name to respond and gets hammered in replies for supporting The Big Orb. Just a quintessential internet moment.
  
  Natural 20
- He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
- Hey, it costs a lot to coif up that hair.
- Fuuuuuuuuuck. I used to watch that guy.
  
  me too. this heel turn is disappointing as hell, and I suspected fuckery at first, but the video excerpts Rebecca clipped and Conover’s actions on Twitter since then make it pretty clear he did this willingly.

Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
https://github.com/Zorokee/ArtificialCast
- Not even Ken Thompson wrote such high quality code in his prime.
  
  Seriously, don't generate an array unless explicitly asked for it. Please.
  Peak prompt engineering right there.
- green
  
  >lightweight >powered by large language models
  lol
- Even with the name it had me going for a while. Whoever wrote it is gonna want to have a lawyer on speed dial for the inevitable license violation.

I'm gonna do something now that prob isn't that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I'm quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
- I’m gonna do something now that prob isn’t that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about
  I consider this both allowed and relevant, though I unfortunately can’t sign it myself
  
  same here, but I’ll pop the link to some euros I know
  
  Thank you.
  E: and small victory but at least .nl made it. more than 3k signatures in day in .nl alone, about 50k increase total.
- Signed!
  
  Thanks!

Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
- Expect the "AI safety" weenuses to have a giant freakout too.
  
  What's the over-under on how many of them voted for Trump lol
  
  The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AI's harms, I absolutely think they're McFucking Losing It™ right now.
- The pro-child-porn caucus.

A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don't like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA's judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
- He is even politely asked at first "no AI sludge please" which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.
- I just read the github issue comment thread he links, what an entitled chode.
  Love that the laughing face reactions to his AI slop laden replies stung so much he ended up posting through it on his blog.
  
  I ended up doing a messy copypasta of the blog through wc -c: 21574
  dude was so peeved at getting told no (after continually wasting other peoples' time and goodwill), he wrote a 21.5KiB screed just barely shy of full-on DARVO (and, frankly, I'm being lenient here only because of perspective (of how bad it could've been))
  as Soyweiser also put it: a bit of a spelunk around the rest of his blog is also Quite Telling in what you may find
  fuck this guy comprehensively, long may his commits be rejected
  (e: oh I just saw Soyweiser also linked to that post, my bad)
  
  Ow god that thread. And what is it with 'law professionals' like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesn't get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).
  E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. "likely your toolchain setting it or your build script" and "I'll unsubscribe from this bug now" seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also "I value such professional behavior very much" tags post with 'korruption'.
  Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged 'korruption' talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against 'the rainbow flag' (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: "Deutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen sollten" "Germany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USA's example". He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! "Musk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistes" (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of "cancel culture", education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!
  There is more stuff like: "Die temporäre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschädigen.", or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you don't speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is 'joking' throw it through google translate).
  E: also forgot, lol at him going 'just run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secs' like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.
- the message I get is to preemptively ban user ms178 from any project I'm on
  
  I did some reading of his blog. Yep, prob for the best.

I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
- The coda is top tier sneer:
  Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If that’s any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
- It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.
- Its definitely petty, but making Altman's all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
  Definitely goes a long way to show why he's an AI bro.

Tante on the hype term 'agentic AI'
- Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, I've found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
  
  I now wonder how that compares to earlier non-LLM AI attempts to create a bot that can play games in general. Used to hear bits of that kind of research every now and then but LLM/genAI has sucked the air out of the room.

Beff back at it again threatening his doxxer. Nitter link
- That whole 'haters just like incomplete information' makes no sense btw. Amazing to get that out of people basically going 'we hate beff for x,y,z' (which I assume happens, as I don't keep up with this beff stuff, I don't like these 'e/acc' people).
- what a strange way to sell your grift no one knows what it's for. "bad people want to force me to tell you what it is we're building."
  
  On one hand the AI doomers are convinced he's building a suitcase nuke.
  On the other hand, skeptical viewers want more assurance he's not just taking the money and building dumb tweets.
- Unrelated to this: man, there should be a parody account called “based beff jeck” which is just a guy trying to promote beck’s vast catalogue as the future of music. Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
  
  Also minus any mention of johnny depp.
  Depp v. Heard was my generation's equivalent to the OJ Simpson trial, so chances are he'll end up conspicuous in his absence.

That Keeper AI dating app has an admitted pedo running its twitter PR (Hunter Ash - old username was Psikey, the receipts are under that).
- 🎶 Certified Keeper guy? Certified pedophile
  (the joke presented itself, I had to :P)

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