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 you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Behold, one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender (according to Yud)

Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?

A lot of rationalists (again including Yudkowsky) endorse eugenics so that’s probably not a coincidence

In a surprising turn and with much hedging, George Hotz suggests that maybe LLMs are bad actually. hackernews says that he's holding it wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263238

At this point I'm starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!

https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-google-graduation-speech-stanford-ai-backlash-eric-schmidt

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. [...] "These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact," he added, referring to AI.

don't kinkshame

It’s 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

They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying "provocative" anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you're the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.

Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.

Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of "general intelligence" which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.

back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you're an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, "oh but they're useful for some things, like making summaries".

four years and billions of dollars and devastation to "improve" them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that "AI summaries" are going well:

it's hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don't already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it's signal-shaped noise). but I'll try.

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

Imagine the disappointment the rats must have felt when watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and wondering why all their heroes are getting their faces melted off.

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)

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

EDIT, snippets:

1. We cannot be satisfied with [...] the so-called “alignment” of AI [..] without [..] 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. [...]

1. [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s 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, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. [...]

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

It’s 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.

I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.

it's just another fash-adjacent subculture

In the latest episode of "behold the power of Mythos" from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software

I distilled it so you don't 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 didn't 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 we're talking.

1,900 Reviewed by external security firms

Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?

1726 confirmed positive

You couldn't 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 better...

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 Anthropic's 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 infographic's 1726 confirmed positives.... But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?

On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.

I'm sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos' own estimations. But wasn't that 1129 the bulk of your reports?

We estimate that we’ve 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 we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.

530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers...

65 of those have been given public advisories

The infographic says 88.

I'd 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 you'd 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 you'd probably get better value for your buck.

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

it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s 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 corps…

I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t 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 I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place

may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular

Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.

don’t kinkshame

Back in my day California perverts said "don't scene in public"

Vibenarok

"Cerisi" 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?

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

Yeaaaaaaaaaah pretty much

Perfection

ooh, brava!

I don't think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media...)

Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn't be given healthcare). It's 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.

Mike Masnick had a look at Twitter's financials in the SpaceX IPO. From $4.5 billion in ad revenue in 2021, twitter + Grok is down to $3 billion ad revenue a year (and losing $6 billion a year just on the CSAM-generating chatbot). His billionaire friends tossed in $2 billion or $250 million each into the kitty after a brief chat back in 2022.

just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here

Seizing "the res novæ of our time" [derogatory] from this

Timnit Gebru:

... an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope's speech where he said that they will "work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence." Chris Olah wasn't a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.

I've not seen this shared here yet so I thought I'd share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/

Eschatoken

what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?

Masnick also has a story on how Musk got away with hiding just how many Twitter shares he owned when he bought the company https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/11/elon-musk-settles-sec-lawsuit-for-spare-change-proving-once-again-that-rules-are-for-other-people/

I honestly can't 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 they're not even coming close. Not even with access to "partner" black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.

And they know they're not succeeding, because they wouldn't 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 "news" blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.

I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Brunson just let me watch the fucking game

Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!

Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20220117205028/https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/

we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it...

Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good...
The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all...

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.

Doesn't claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they're 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 pope's first address to the college of Cardinals: “In 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 can't even get past the first full chapter of this shit.

I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more

I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI

I'm surprised that the religious fanatics (protestant) haven't turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machine that tells kids to kill themselves wouldn't be much of a reach.

So what's 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 I'm gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn't check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of "more or less right, we swear"

Aella asks what type of sexist she is based off some poll results