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. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
Is it me, or do attempts to make movies with AI tools
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/24RKHEkwgZ6Hm6ygY/can-an-llm-make-a-feature-length-movie-on-its-own
Remind me of SCPs
Oh boy, this is the most straightforwardly delulu lesswrong post I’ve ever seen.
If you see issues in the YouTube video, rest assured that those issues survived even more than two generation attempts.
lol
AI slop is very good at falling into the uncanny valley, whether that paragraphs of pure nothingness from a text extruder, or strange almost-human looking imagery that looks and feels inexplicably wrong. Its a great way to produce some accidental nightmare fuel, especially considering the AI bros glazing such shit are incapable of recognising its accidentally disturbing nature.
As a “fun” sidenote, there was an SCP article on the site which acted like a slop generator (SCP-1004, Factory Porn). Its writer, DrBright, was permabanned in 2022 after a lengthy history of sexual harassment was uncovered (and the article was deleted altogether in February of this year). Feels oddly fitting, in the worst way possible.
I’ve had the same thought about Factory Porn, it’s is basically what Image slop generators are, right down to the addictive nature, even when it isn’t porn being generated.
It still cant keep scenes consistent for more than 5 seconds amazing.
I got to 47 seconds and there’s a guy driving a tent stake with a mallet that isn’t quite there, only to have the mallet disappear.
“So you printed out a piece of the internet for us to throw away.”
45 minutes is even better
SlateScott first floated his bright idea about “medical ethics are for foreigners not a good-hearted genius like me” in 2010.
Here’s what happens. In some far off corner of the world, some psycho doctor does something horrible like deliberately inject a patient with flesh-eating bacteria. The media hears about it and panics the public, who become suitably enraged and make demands of their politicians. Their politicians go to leading medical administrators and demand that doctors be more ethical. The leading medical administrators obviously don’t control the actions of every single psycho doctor, so they think quick and say “Okay, we’ll make all medical students take a class on Ethics and Professionalism,” hand the implementation off to professors, and then raise their own salaries for thinking of such a brilliant idea.
I guess California and Alberta and Sweden and Japan were far off from Cork, Ireland. How did he pass that class?
Hippocratic oath is government-imposed oppression apparently
There is no way that the class did not cover how MDs and nurses have been central to state atrocities for 150 years, from Bush’s torture program to MK-ULTRA to Unit 731 to the original eugenicists (who kept committing wild sterilizations into the 1970s). There is no way that it did not cover how authorities often hint at what they want done without being so vulgar as to say it where it could come up at their trial.
But didn’t he get that authoritarian followers are deterred if an authority figure like a professor says “the following acts are unacceptable?”
Greta D. says she met Yudkowsky at the wedding of his ex and Duncan S. (cw: rationalists propositioning each other) “Mawwage, is a dweam within a dweam …”
OpenAI is slowing development because of uh safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/open-ai-pause-hack
Definitely not because improvement is stagnating and they’re running out of money
It just occurred to me that this makes Anthropic look bad, actually
if OpenAI is slowing down because they concerned about
moneyAI safety, then it makes Anthropic look like fools for publishing that blog where they waffle on about keeping up the race because of “bad actors”If OpenAI is slowing down, an Anthropic that actually is concerned about safety would slow down too. But they won’t, because
moneyChina“bad actors”Well I’d like it if they actually stuck to this, since it would finally lessen the flow of AI slop. Wouldn’t be surprised if this gets quietly ignored because OpenAI
otherSneerClub has a post where some kind of statistics/science VTuber (??) analyzes aella’s twitter polls and resulting studies. it’s fun. I’ll link to the substack directly but the reddit post should be easy to find. Link
the woman herself shows up in the substack comments with the most pitiful display of “I’m just a smol self-taught bean why are you being so mean to me?”
Erika rightly responds by calling out Aella’s own attitude towards the people who know how to apply the level of rigor to the data that she (apparently admittedly?) doesn’t. Like, you can’t simultaneously be this dismissive of the norms and processes of the scientific establishment and also claim ignorance and inability when your inability or refusal to follow those norms leads you to crap conclusions.
I really like the self perpetuating optimism loop thing in the reply to Aella, it’s like a whole new cognitive bias I hadn’t thought applied to rationalists.
I also still believe academia is a deeply broken culture. I believe this in large part because most academics have told me this.
You seem to believe uncritically what they tell you here. The truth is, everyone LOVES to complain but if you tell them “THEN LEAVE??” they’d rather keep their position. And it’s very normal, actually. most systems (idk, liek law, healthcare, environmental protection) are “deeply broken.”
Maybe you think that only systems worth engaging with are those with self-perpetuating optimism loops? where everyone is so happy and satisfied with the community and activities? If so, it matches really well the intellectual environment I think you are in.
Witnessed an “AI-Powered political sandbox” called President Simulator crop up after seeing someone stream it on Discord.
I felt tempted to try and fuck with it, but its asking me to sign up for some fucking reason
Well it took longer than I expected, but the AI 2027 guys finally posted a second update
This table is essentially the TLDR
They also finally explained the “2025 was 75% of AI 2027’s progress” thing and it seems like that number was mostly skewed by revenue (edit: valuation) numbers
For some reason their website lists the date of ASI as 12/2028 even though their actual graph only had a 32% chance tops of ASI happening on that date
<edited> Didnt I hear them say a while back that its not even revenue numbers? That its valuation of the companies being taken as proxy of value produced.
I find myself caring so little what these people think about anything
That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.
I believe that was mentioned here
Here’s that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the “Economic Value” numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this… the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). “Coding Time Horizon” is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don’t have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren’t, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
“AI Software R&D Uplift” is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement… and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
According to one of the writers apparently 17% is supposed to be ‘progress is 17% slower than expected’, so the 34% figure here implies progress is 34% slower than expected, so that’s actually worse
That wouldn’t make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.
Yeah that’s what tripped me up, because if that was true then it’d make no sense why the percent of progress went up while the uplfit number went down.
Update on the slop dentist situation: second opinion says that loved one has zero cavities. I suspect that her only problem was having a non-median mouth that wasn’t well-represented in Pearl AI’s training data.
It was called fucking Pearl AI? god these people suck so fucking bad
ugh, right?
here’s someone who cutesly spells “EA” as “∃Ɐ” and posts
Oh yeah, I saw the author post this. The argument appears to be “blow 40% of the Norwegian Pension Fund’s current value on OpenAI, because democracy?” and then goes on to paint opposition to datacenters as a “you will be left behind” move. Just absolutely dumb stuff all around.
“OpenAI has tapped out one petrostate already, time to move to the next one!”
FWIW I have no clue how the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund is managed. The principal idea is to sequester windfall earnings from hydrocarbon extraction from the normal day-to-day economy, avoiding a boom-and-bust cycle and the resource curse.
That said, it’s pretty useless to just store a bunch of money to use “later”. I can imagine a portion is used for infrastructure (all those marvelous tunnels) but taxes on income and VAT are eye-wateringly high (and I say that as a Swede!). So there has to be some political pressure to raid the piggy bank, not least for election winning purposes.
So presumably the fund is insulated from day to day meddling. On the other hand, you can’t just hand over the reins to 25 year old coke-addicted MBAs.
My main point is that for the proposal to happen, someone will have to try to convince the people in charge of the fund that betting the farm on Sama not ripping you off is worth doing. Possible? Maybe. Probable? I fucking hope not.
Does anyone get why CJ the X (they/he pronouns) and our friends are playing footsie? The best I can find is https://sojo.net/articles/culture/cj-x-nonbinary-philosopher-shaping-gen-zs-spiritual-imagination Do they have any actual connection to PUA outside Aella? Any video essays on the philosophy of gender? I think their look is a TikTok thing and a queer camp thing although some PUA like pearemoveding too.
I suppose my kneejerk objection to their appearance reminding me of PUAs from Strauss’ “The Game” is rooted in a fear that it’s another manifestation of the rationalist pathology of reinventing everything from first principles. Rainbow eyeliner and random feathers aren’t inherently terrible on their own. But using over-the-top fashion as a tactic to cultivate more sexual attention was a central part of Strauss’ cohort 20 years ago, it was widely publicized (and often mocked) all over the internet, and that subculture was ultimately harmful to a lot of people! We can learn from the past! And most of the people Strauss hung around with and documented were specifically and obsessively pursuing heterosexual sex and norms, so I don’t trust whatever remains of that culture to automatically be cool with trans and nonbinary people, especially if it gets cross-pollinated with whatever the hell Aella is doing.
There’s also something to be said of the inherent narcissism of the influencer economy? Like, I prefer my video essayists to have more of a burned-out academic vibe so CJ has been adjacent to but not on my radar. That being said, having a very distinct aesthetic is pretty common in the space because having a hook is what brings in eyeballs and thus patreon subs or superchats or whatever else turns that into an actual career. I would sooner assume he’s using a similar strategy to manipulate viewers into clicking his face rather than that he’s actively following the PUA playbook.
Aella’s orientation seems very straight and patriarchal (she wants a strong, wealthy, dominant man, and she frames her polls around men and women not around figuring out what the people you have the hots for are in to). Queer, trans, and nonbinary rationalists seem to end up on the sidelines (eg. Duncan Sabien, Ozy).
Fans say that CJ is a music-school dropout and that its not clear how they funded themself before becoming a successful vlogger. Toronto is not cheap. “Autododact” and “parents with some money” fits the pattern.
they pronouns
he
his
?
Oops! All I know about them is their presence at Bay Area rationalist events. Fixed the OP.
I’m also interested in answers to this; I don’t really follow youtube types in general (and even less other of the pop names) so I didn’t even know this name until it showed up here this week
I cut YouTube out of my life a year ago, briefly returned for idle entertainment like cooking shows, and then gave it up again. Even before all that, I was generally ignorant of who YouTube-famous people were.
I ruthlessly cull any helpful “suggestions” from my YT recommendations and try to do some due diligence on the people I do follow.
Jane street is pressuring olympiads to not sanction Israel.
Gee, who could have foreseen that letting them touch everything under the math sun could have consequences.
such a weird hill to die on. I’d imagine that Israeli kids still get to participate, just under a different flag (just like the Russians in the 2026 FIDE candidates tournament). Surely if you just care about the math this shouldn’t be such a big deal?
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,” https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/1-ezra-klein-is-166891080 ), and i went to upload it to our rss host, zencastr. friends. zencastr is so fucked now. the only interface, as far as i can tell, is an llm, and it tormented me. im just gonna dump the screenshots. this is a fragment of an exhausting hour of back and forth.
note that i apparently have 10k credits, which i assume are temporary and there as a welcome to the new service. a single credit is a few bucks and in total the bill just for the conversation came out to about 6-7 dollars
it also tried to get me to use this absolutely horrible episode description
i asked it to schedule the episode for 9 am Tuesday, aug 18th, same as the patreon, and it said it did. turns out it went out this morning. cool! if you listen by rss it’s out now i guess.
i posted on reddit asking how to switch hosts. the ceo found that post today and offered his hand, which i bit
i keep thinking about that bit in a philip k dick novel where the protagonist’s door tries to chisel tips out of him before opening, and threatens to sue him when he bypasses the lock. i hate the future/present so much
holy fuck that’s infuriating
imagine the worst possible CLI and then make it even worse and then make it an asshole
real rich of their CEO (presumably? it looks like a burner account which still checks out if it’s their CEO or someone who works for him doing damage control and trying to take this shit to DMs) to both anthropomorphize their chatbot and assert that the problem is you need uhh training on the system that doesn’t do what you want it to do and keeps trying to charge you for shit that makes your workflow worse
honestly the thing that makes me think it is actually their CEO is I’ve watched these fuckers use “let’s take this to DMs/email” as an attempted power move. they seriously think we want to talk to them privately about, like, anything at all. no fucker I’m here to call you out in public because your product is shit and you’re shit too.
I’m using Zencastr cos the free tier is the right price and I’ve found my way to evade most of the AI crap thankfully. “New recording” on the front page or in existing sessions seems to take you to the bit that actually does shit.
I just record with it, I grab the MOV and WAV files and I put it together from that and (after much faff) upload to YouTube and Libsyn. I shudder at the thought of Libsyn going AI, cos otherwise they just do a good job of hosting the mp3 files and running the RSS and I can get onto Apple without having to interact with Apple.
adrian still hasn’t responded
I haven’t been listening to your podcast (no shade, it’s just not my thing) but I’ll have to listen to this because my God that man frustrates me.
He basically exists to funnel run the:
intellectually curious libs -> smug superiority complex with status quo bias -> reactionary
pipeline.
hell yeah, get his ass! o7
What were they thinking?!
PS:
So last night I finished editing the latest odium symposium episode (“ezra klein is a disgusting worm,)…
A+ hook
The episode dropped and I’m like 2/3 in and have already passed my previous record for the number of times I’ve had to pause an episode of OS to make a little angry noise.
Alternative title: Adam No! Bonk
Word is that both Adam Conover and Carol Queen have backed out.
Run away, Nina, run away!
so maybe this is a bit too obvious to state at this point but: conover’s very obviously tied up in aella’s plzdontkillus EA influencer scheme, his apparent anti-AI stance is purely performative, and the apology he did for doing marketing for worldcoin on his channel isn’t accepted. he knew what he was doing.
also, I really don’t need the Adam Ruins Everything guy in the same part of my brain as sex, thanks
countdown to Comedian Sex Pest Scandal in
can we kick aella and her friends out of perversion
Perverts (shower-positive)
cj nooo… someone come get my favorite parasocial essay-they out of there
Nina Hartley coshing a Nazi with a dildo was not on my 2026 Bingo card but I can hope
Edit / Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything seems like a mainstream ‘Mythbusters’ type TV presenter, if he likes older women and she needs a dildo caddy this has potential. We talked about CJ the X here.
Every time a new person learns who Aella is, an angel loses its wings.
Some things are classics for a reason.
Regarding Gretta’s job title “orgy organizer”:
besides the point but orgynizer was right there
https://bsky.app/profile/mecha-lenin-3000.bsky.social/post/3mtcx7bixkc2u
Whoever CJ TheX is, they look like they strolled straight out of Neil Strauss’ book. Is it valid to call somebody an “unreconstructed pickup artist” if there was never any attempt at (or even possibility of) reconstruction?
edit: they/them pronouns
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
I think I’ve ranted before about how gallingly unnecessary the destruction is. Google books invested the time and money to improve their nondestructive scanners and apparently thanks to the incoherent application of copyright law that was not only unnecessary but actively counterproductive and opened them up to more legal risk. Is there a legal theory that allows me to smack Judge Alsup with a rolled-up newspaper? Might make me feel better.
Eliezer ‘I am the author, and I am above tropes’ Yudkowsky has an entire page dedicated to tropes associated with him on a bootleg TvTropes website
He has a page on TV Tropes too, but it’s much shorter
E: HPMoR also has a page.
The “Your Mileage May Vary” page even gets in a sneer!
Derailing: He has a habit of going down the list of tvtropes fanfic recommendations and leaving reviews on ff.net exclaiming how amazing it is that the author’s story is just as or almost as good as his own writing while dropping his story’s name. He probably reads these stories but considering that in roughly 30% of these reviews he quotes lines of these stories out of context in order to draw false parallels to his philosophies, he may simply be skimming them.
Yea verily, he is almost as smooth at this as I am at inserting references to The Romance of T’Lyn and Beckett Mariner.
the YMMV page also has this gem:
Values Dissonance: While his works are an interesting read no matter where you come from morally, a lot of his stuff is a bit… disturbing if your Paranoia Fuel involves Borg, Cybermen, Replicants, eugenics, individual or social reprogramming, just about any other form of Cybernetics Eat Your Soul or Hive Mind in fiction, or just something the Genre Savvy Doomed Contrarian would run like hell from. Granted, he goes out of his way to not use fiction as a starting point for ethics discussions, but you never really know…
They got another (unintended) sneer on another page
Also, advertising your own fics in other people’s comments is massive loser behaviour
Seems like Yud saw fanfiction as an arena he could advertise in and recruit from, not a community he was participating in. Hence he used all the tricks to get as many hits and reviews as possible.
This view on the community also explains his recklessness not only with aggressively monetizing HPMOR, but also his willingness to risk drawing JK Rowlings attention to his fanfiction (towards the end of HPMOR, one of his author’s notes was looking for someone to reach out to her).
I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at [email protected].
Rowling (and Warner Brothers) have been litigious with their IP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_disputes_over_the_Harry_Potter_series#Other_accusations_of_infringement . So this was a reckless move on EY’s part, possibly indicating that he doesn’t appreciate the delicate place fanfic (and its communities) are in.
Edit: thinking about the way Rowling has shown her true face over the past decade… “with all profits accruing to a UK charity” makes me wonder if in whatever fantasy universe Eliezer did talk Rowling into allowing published fanfic to be monetized for “charities”, that money would all end up going to TERF “charities”.
Somehow, the people who write stories where everyone just ends up in a giant fuck pile are both less vain and more dignified.
What does Tom Cruise do for Scientology? (Not that I think Radcliffe would have fallen for it, I have the impression that he’s a fairly level-headed guy as former child actors go)
Lol, I assume he was just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what would stick?
What If: A Chick tract was 600,000 words?
Well put.
