Want to wade into the sandy, spooky 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 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. The spooks are well underway.)

I saw several people mention it last week, but have not really used it much myself, anybody know how dead stack overflow is atm due to the AI backlash?

More disucssion about AI safety over at LGM

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/10/ai-safety

comments are a mix, some smart generalists incorrecting each other. I have not bothered to comment because I'm not an active part of the community, but I'll share here that Rofer's recommendations about safety we can apply now would presumably help us contain Robot Satan should it deign to be created. Lots of commenters don't really draw that conclusion. This is pointing out the yawning void between the intense interest among Rats to devise the perfect alignment and their disinterest at mitigating harms ocurring right now.

Starting off with a double bill:

• First, a new post from Iris Meredith about enshittification, featuring a cameo from the rats.

• Second, a truly godawful take on art history coming from a DHH defender (h/t Daphne Preston-Kendal)

Pretty dead, checking one of their own graphs - the number of questions on the site has been in freefall for the past few years:

I'm starting to believe that Sam Altman's reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated

Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman

With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.

This is such a dumb take because it's wrong in both directions.

Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn't be trusted to write code and by trusting them you're going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they'll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor's value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don't get any more capable.

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.

I don't entirely agree; 200000 questions asked per day is arguably a worse situation than 100 asked per day, and the latter rounds to 0 in that chart.

But yeah it feels pretty dead.

Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.

LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Sweden's health authority are chill https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-pestsmitta and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish

Thanks!

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.

Its completely wrong, too - the camera's invention didn't render painting obsolete like he implies. The only way you'd come to that conclusion is if you're utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insight.

Iris suggested "prevent[ing] people from studying software development and only software development" in her article. I fully endorse that idea - at the bare minimum, it'd hopefully reduce the number of dipshits like this guy.

Yeah you can expect the questions to taper off a bit as the knowledge base drops off and more people get that you are not supposed to ask a question already answered, but this is indeed a cliff.

I think the advent of photography decimated a particular genre of painting - portraits, but it was still a tail-off. The middle classes could get photo portraits done but they were only B&W and small (a Daguerreotype is basically twice as big as a standard photo print) and still quite expensive. So if you wanted a big color portrait of a loved one, you still had to commission a painting. Same for landscapes.

@BlueMonday1984 @sinedpick > The only way you’d come to that conclusion is if you’re utterly devoid of creativity and artistic insightYou might be onto something here

Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise

Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo

Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs

A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, "Sounds like you're probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality."

Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.

Friend sent me this steaming turd.

What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
By Clara Collier and Angela Chen

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-researchers-quit-openai-anthropic.html

https://archive.li/5uwn8

Feature some of our regular friends, like our new friend, Jacob Coxon, and our very good friend Kokotajlo

Note that this was written by asterisk mag (peep the authors) as a collab.

Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center -- a big EA-funded journalism outlet -- is funding Kevin Roose's and Casey Newton's new podcast, "Machine Gods". I'm sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.

let's continue with the HP theme

One of the most underexplored aspects of Harry Potter's worldbuilding is the color of Lucius Malfoy's hair.

Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Here's The Code. by JREG

So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut.

but good sneers in the comments:

ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing

remember that jroko’s basilisk will double torture you if you don’t try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector

"model welfarists" is quite the neologism

E:

repo: https://github.com/terrafying/ai-torture-chamber
manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers

manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers

If you called this a schizopost, Jreg would proudly agree with you. Especially the entire "You Are Autistic" section where he invents new and insane flavours of ableism, then proudly declares himself a schizophrenic, for the purpose of hating AI more.

You don't need to feel empathy for the LLM to think this is a terrible idea. The desire to torture anything, simulated or not, is such an incredible red flag that I don't even know what to say...

Also what a waste of time and energy that would be better spent doing pretty much anything else

Yeah if somebody has a youtube channel where filled with clips where he goes alphabetically through all fallout new vegas characters and kills each of them in 100 different ways, I would certainly that no that is pretty fucking weird.

E: ow god there is a guy like this out there isnt there? Bonus points if it turns out this was 'the golden one'

Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.

He's a provocateur who believes in the value of extremism for its own sake. Getting as many people as possible to find his politics offensive and argue with each other in the comments is the point.

Well, who could've guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, only made to be clipped and go viral on twitter

More to the point, plague is treable by a dozen antibiotics

and even if it weren't it is well out of the Twilight Zone that COVID was in where large chunks of the population were at low enough risk from it even without immune memory that they can't be arsed to do anything about it, instead it's in the Smallpox Leagues where you bring the hammer down wherever you see it.

The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GoX3uYQ4QN5HKvL7u/please-give-them-a-chance-on-china-rationalism-and-ai-safety

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmxkHm2dTLKG6GZ6i/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-researcher

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/b5cSYh4emQb2qrGmK/on-social-reality-in-china

Yeah, as soon as I saw him mention "schizophrenia" and talk down to autistic people, I immediately wondered if this was perhaps a moron who had skimmed the wiki articles on Deleuze and Guattari and was intentionally misapplying schizoanalysis as a cheap troll

q: on the implementation - Is this basically "torturing" the LLM by prompting it with "you are being tortured, lol' in a system prompt?

A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:

Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like 'maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest' and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is 'hmmm that's probably free speech and cancellation'?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZAqaQrAimgfweHGSr/nathan-young-s-shortform?commentId=LEpKzfwr8oibwBWw3

I vaguely recall once arguing that an arts education should be mandatory for all students. Honestly, that would probably solve a lot of problems in society.

Maybe if we banned teaching MBAs altogether alongside it...

nyc is having a hearing on AI risks today

Daniel Kokotajlo also recently posted his Senate testimony

The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:

When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.

Goddamn it, people

It continues

the HPMOR comic

No no no no

Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer

HPMOR is the rationalist version of the Nigerian prince scam. It immediately weeds out anyone who isn't a good mark.

Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he's proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.

It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and don't exclude someone based on hearsay and "probably a rapist".

🫪

I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world... it's bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute "Watchtower magazine" or "Dianetics" for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.

What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World

Surely not things you can print in the newspaper. Surely.

Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won't appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to "safety-pill" China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825

Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level "What if Batman met Mario?!" exploration of media.

Why does the kitchen in the "zen of instant coffee" strip have two stoves?

Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.

My God, it's like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There's a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it's capped at "shit".

Like it or not, we programmers, like painters before us, are slowly going to disappear. AI, like the camera, completely changed the game. You can sulk about it, or you can pick up a camera, start learning, and become a photographer.

Thinking that photography is just super advanced painting (and that there are no more painters??) shows a lack of understanding of either. But this is an AI-huffer, so I repeat myself.

If I'm no longer writing the code, what exactly am I doing? If you ponder that question, let me ask you another one: Do civil engineers do engineering?

My mom is a civil engineer. I have tons of memories of her at her giant drawing table with rice paper, rulers, pens, and razor blades, designing people's homes. With her pen she dug trenches, laid rebar, set walls, and picked the type of concrete to use without ever picking up a shovel. She was doing engineering. She was solving hard problems with hard constraints. The fact that someone else picked up a shovel, cut the rebar, set up molds, and poured the concrete doesn't take that away from her.

You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job!

people forget that there are areas in russia, not very far away from there, where plague is endemic in wild rodents

Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original

Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles.