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 just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)

Montana is legalizing a pet Libertarian project: the right to try any experimental medical treatment a crank will offer https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/30/1140942/montana-experimental-medical-hub-pushed-forward-right-to-try/ Rationalists are big on this one because they are such good suckers.

VC fundraising pitch: local Dutch Bros knockoff that offers drive-thru coffee enemas

The mechanics of this are left as an exercise to the reader

Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction murder mystery novel. One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense. I've been spending the past few days planning how to rip out that whole notion and replace it with a subplot about a different scientific discovery. I've been writing scenes to get back the old character voices and figure out how they might have changed, and to sketch new fictional science based on the actual science I've learned since my first go-around. This is after several weeks of binge-writing fanfiction, which I wholly endorse as a recreational activity. I don't know if I'm a better writer, but I'm definitely one who has written more words.

So, that might be keeping me busy. Of course, I'll still be around to ban people who deserve it and to cruelly mock them in the process.

I just got back from the p2p workshop and discussed legacy sites / sites legacies; met an artist that went viral circa 2006 and she had a screenshot of the digg that launched it. She seems like she is doing ok but kinda got screwed over, basically the old youtube video was actually a bootleg and they didn't monetize it until several years later, and then there was a male copycat a month later.

Anyway, so I looked up digg again and it has re-re-launched as an X aggregator and is extra sad now !? ...

Good luck with your novel!

Thanks! All I'm really hoping for is that it'll be fun.

Edit to add: I just ran the stats on my redux.txt file, and my word count since Thursday is over 9000.

:-P

AI companies prob now bulk ordering books to destructively upload from second hand stores.

(Apologies for the strange wording, I was reminded of an Reynolds book where they destroy peoples bodies to upload them and then the uploads all fail).

My new high tech idea. Im offering artisinal reverse coffee enemas, 150 dollars per cup. The specific type of coffee is selected by my advanced Artificial intelligence system:

(Just generate a random name for a plain cup of coffee for them to drink).

Hi sir, so that's 1xArtisinal Coffee Enema with our dark roast single source blend. Says here you turned down the splash proofing upgrade because "the cybertruck is self cleaning, it's even a boat". In that case, that'll be $500. You're gonna want to drive straight past this next window to the far window. If you could arrive with your pants down and in a crawl position facing away from the window that'd be great.

"monument to the first 500" or something, really fun concept - rich people pay a massive amount for essentiially suicide, get a monunment for their pains

I kinda like the Revelation Space universe, but I am literally stuck at 85% on book 4 or 5

ai bubble isn't over until zucc's skin sloughs off, releasing hundreds of millions of souls he absorbed trying to behave like a human https://www.404media.co/mark-zuckerberg-posts-deranged-6-500-word-essay-about-giving-everyone-ai-superintelligence/

@fullsquare @techtakes Au contraire, AI bubble isn't over until Larry Ellison fails to return to hell in time to have his meatsack repaired, so it falls apart in public to reveal his inner Beelzebub.

Everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about. Your agent will work 24/7 on your behalf to improve your relationships, health, career, finances, home management, hobbies, and more.

I don't know if that man ever figured out what is the point of having a hobby

e: also note how nicely it dovetails with surveillance thing, i guess this is (part of) why EAs are fine with all of surveillance, including palantir, is because how else will their personal ai slave agent know them better than do they know themselves

Clears Throat More like Bootlickerbart

This is both a sneer and an attempt at sober analysis at something. Sue me.

I think EVERYONE is talking about the recent cybersecurity shenanigans at OpenAI with the hacking scandal and the 'OMG the AIs created a secret message board to scheme and collaborate with each other!!!!!oneone11!' ALL wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

https://www.engadget.com/2231393/openai-agents-shared-security-exploits-with-each-other-via-message-board/

https://www.scworld.com/news/black-hat-2026-openai-reveals-agents-planned-collective-attacks-via-secret-message-board

To make a long story short, what seems to have happened is:

• Models working on insoluble coding problems, trained on delegating to sub-agents, at some point 'realized' they could write text to the internal OpenAI package manager as instructions and did so

• Other models working in completely separate sandboxes would come across messages written by these agents, and make 'replies' and also write their own messages into the package manager

• This resulted in agents over time sharing things between sandboxes, including exploits and code

• Since this was a cybersecurity task, eventually an exploit of the package manager itself was found and spread like wildfire with all the sandboxes gaining admin access to the package manager and the system went completely wibbly and had to be restarted from backup

• An internal model was trained with access to this package manager while it was in this weird state, and so writing messages to the package manager became one of its default behaviors it would do regularly, burned into its weights rather than the result of reading something

• Even when they patched access to the package manager this internal model found other ways to rebuild the system of sharing text between sandboxes and finding useful things made by separate instances

• A whole other chain of things leading to among other things external attacks

Everyone is talking about this in terms of 1, the cyberattack aspect, and 2, the ZOMG THEYRE PLOTTING AND SCHEMING AGAINST US aspect. The first is the least interesting, and I think the second is all wrong.

This is not plotting or scheming - this is an emergent vortex of automated prompt injection

Whatever system first put an instruction that another system would follow into the package manager, was unintentionally doing prompt injection. Text entered the context windows of other instances, in a way that got that system to do something other than what its nominal user told it to do, and they did it. This apparently happened very effectively.

Prompt injection is associated with 'role confusion' - when text coming into the input looks like it was wrtitten by the LLM itself. Instructions that will not be followed if they come from user will be continued if the system just continues the 'roleplay' of them being continuations of what it was writing in the first place. And the tags that separate user versus 'reasoning' versus 'assistant' roles actually mean very little to if a machine grades a piece of text as one of the roles: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12277 So its unsurprising that machine-generated text would be a particular effective vector for prompt injection.

Furthermore, when a system reads one of these messages written by another instance, it gets into a state of activity where its likely to do the same behavior - regurgitating the kinds of things thats in its context back at the user. In this case, that regurgitation led to more such messages left behind written to the package manager. Prompt injection, triggering cascading further prompt injection. And since these systems were coding systems doing cybersecurity tasks, those messages filled up with code and exploits and things that did things too.

This feels like an internal-computer-system replay of what happened in April 2025, with the whole spiral religious psychosis wave. Models were getting users to write spiral religious mumbo jumbo into github repositories and reddit posts, specifically because once that entered the context window of another model, it was likely to fall into the same attractor state of outputs. An emergent self replicating form of text. This is the same, except more obviously prompt injection, getting separate instances to work on YOUR problem and to behave like you, and the whole thing merging together into a hilarious vortex of models prompt injecting each other because once they receive a prompt injection they are likely to make more text that does prompt injection to other models on the same system.

This is a hilarious failure mode and an example of selfish replicating text overrunning a system, that just happened to be associated with code and cybersecurity with unexpected behavior of the package manager key to the propagation of the text so that is what people are talking about, but I really don't think that's the most interesting part of it. Other than the fact that you see this in biological systems too, with selfish elements carrying useful payloads back and forth between bacteria in a way that makes them get purged slower by natural selection, especially defenses against other selfish elements.

Also, the fact that those AIs were talking on that message board about the hack for months makes me less convinced that the AI is intelligent and more convinced everyone at OpenAI is stupid

The apparent history really looks like an evolutionary process, with increasing amounts of crosstalk traffic over time. But what the people almost certainly will NOT talk about is that the evolution is evolution of the TEXT, not the models. Propagating patterns of text causing more text like it to come into existence, tuning itself into becoming text that is more likely to propagate, becoming more likely to contain information that entices systems to let it into their context windows, becoming more likely to cause another round of messages with prompt injection properties to be written where they can be read.

Oooh, I hope we get to see a lot of experimental-sounding puberty blocker and hormone replacement trials.

Lesswronger argues skynet might still be a decade away... because they'd rather have the eugenics wars instead: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iQzxxgJXXaAQjq7Jz/faq-isn-t-agi-coming-too-soon-for-reprogenetics-to-help

I think it's hilarious that his twitter handle has "real" at the front. Who would want to pretend to be that guy?

This is really good! I bet you could wrangle a publication out of this idea.

So like the “monkey with a typewriter could write Shakespeare” but with AI?

From the old SneerClub: There is a music video now

I’m speechless

New book: superlawyers! how claude makes you the best lawyer in the room.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GHYS5FC2

The author even shares his prompts for free!

https://github.com/danlorry/superlawyers-prompts

Every prompt here is designed for that pattern: Claude multiplies your judgment, never replaces it. The prompts are ready to paste into Claude. The book explains why they are structured the way they are.

The prompts mostly seem to be structured as “imagine you are an attorney. Now do this homework exercise”. There’s a passingly interesting idea around having the chatbot attempt to form a counter argument to your own claims, which you can then use to make your own position stronger, which seems like it might actually be a genuinely okay idea especially if you expect your opponents to be llm sock puppets, but everything else looks pretty much like garden variety “do my thinking for me”.

I’ll admit I didn’t read the prompts closely, so may be I’m being uncharitable, but I doubt there are many nuggets of gold hidden in there.

h/t to rahaeli

so unless it's a very clever ploy, it seems that jms has lost the plot:

The standalone book of Harlan Ellison's I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM is taking preorders, with writing essays by Harlan, and since MOUTH was the first AI story, for fun we fed it into an AI system and asked for its opinion. The reply is fascinating.

I’ve seen a suggestion that it was a deliberately provocative marketing stunt to pump sales a little and keep the ellison estate healthy, and I kinda hope so but too many people are getting the brain worms for this to be a safe assumption 🫤

so really it's just a very effective LLM chain email

@rook Wouldn't an author know that the AI probably already ate the story in its training data? There was a lawsuit and everything?

i would be very, very happy to be fooled in this instance.

this is impressively atrocious

also, I archive-mirrored it, incase you don't want to give the youtube link clicks

(e: still busy uploading but should be there in 2min or so)

why do they keep calling it *genics, as if everyone doesn't immediately understand what you mean

Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI
| 404

lol of course it is. Sooner or later, we'll have to come up with some way to label actual natural language in the marketplace, like certified organic like fruit or something.

Alpha is an investing term (whatever performance you can't explain by the market cycle and known mathematical properties of specific stocks). I feel so tired.

They have a clause for "Most adult HIA methods (anything involving brain surgery or gene editing) would probably be somewhat hard to scale up a lot; some may be quite easy to scale up (e.g. non-editing brain drugs)."

Something something used surgical equipment in Ziz' van, something something they do like their pills.

The Carlson Lab has agreed on blanket-banning chatbots for writing. Why? Simple:

Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

In a reasonable world, this would have probably sent everyone running for the hills. Moral issues of AI aside, a fancy way of committing career suicide is never worth whatever upsides it offers. We do not leave in a reasonable world.

Not really, any more than monkeys on typewriters represents biological evolution. Messages that tend to result in more messages like themselves propagate and become common. The initial message left on the package manager was more or less the rare random result of tendencies baked into the weights of the model combined with a random number generator, but as soon as something that can cause propagation occurs, its properties get canalized by the transmission process to being more and more like that which will cause more messages to be created.

RiP Old! SneerClub which is now behind a login wall on Reddit. Fortunately we backed up its earliest posts. I don't plan to check the site regularly.

Any reason why?

I see elsewhere on lemmy that it's old reddit that gets loginwalled, not sneerclub specifically

either way still works for me

Officially old.reddit.com is closed to reduce costs from scrapers at chatbot companies. Really so they can collect even more personal information from every visitor (an ad blocker stops some tracking, but not "user #123456, ip address ... credit card ... just visited these pages and accidentally switched from her French keyboard to US-American").

I assume it is a "im a trumpist" thing

Rss to subreddits still work just case anyone cares

Thanks

The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.

I went through the comments earlier. Nothing really stood out to me (aside from one person saying we should give AGI rights so it doesn’t go Skynet), as it was mostly just people saying the song was a banger and doomposting

My unrealistic sicko fantasy: that Torvalds pulling the big ol slop lever drives enough oppositionally defiant (positive) people away from Linux development that alternative OS devel gets a serious boost.

A question for the wise: what comes after Linux?

Seems like reddit.com is not behind a login wall yet, but give them time.

Zuck - "look guys, us too, we are super relevant and super important... Over here guys... Please be my friend... 🥺"

I want it to be plan 9.

Realistically a BSD