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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Starting this Stubsack off: a pentester talks about testing an AI chatbot and its associated API, finding vulnerabilities they hadn't seen in a decade.

Been getting the ol’ targeted ads for an EA convention. Next time I get one I’ll be shilling the shrimp welfare farm I just started

https://www.patreon.com/MaxRead/posts/ai-x-risk-and-ai-173181621

worth the full read, but here's the parts I liked

But "x-risk" is not the only kind of "existential" risk about which AI enthusiasts and their converts tend to worry. This recent Ezra Klein column, written in the wake of OpenAI's release of hundreds of mathematical proofs, is a nice articulation of something I've come to think of as "n-risk," for "ennui risk" (with the mutual understanding that it's not pronunciation-accurate so don't bother making a nitpicky little comment about it): fear of the loss of comprehension, control, and meaning in the face of impossibly sophisticated godlike machines poses.

We see the threat of "n-risk" in some of the emotional reaction of mathematicians faced with the results of OpenAI models bulldozing through open problems: a sense of having been surpassed and left behind, having the meaning from which one derives one's worth totally emptied. In some sense, on a conceptual level and as a discursive object, x-risk is preferable to n-risk: it's striking, dramatic, and offers us humans an ongoing chance at great feats of heroism and genius. N-risk has no such narrative reassurances. Maybe it's better to burn out (as your body is turned into a paperclip) than to fade away.

Here you might ask: Is the cause of melancholy and despair on the part of some mathematicians simply the knowledge that a computer system has surpassed their ability to understand or produce proofs? Or is it the realization that said computer system is privately owned and confidentially developed in service of accumulation rather than the pursuit of shared human knowledge? Or is it the contempt with which the people who work for the computer system companies and the hanger-on fans of these computer systems seem to regard the mathematicians? Or is it the sudden recognition that the pursuit of mathematical truths has already been so totally devalued by an anti-intellectual social system that you can no longer feel secure that the tradition to which you have devoted your life will continue as a space of intellectual inquiry, even given the development of these new tools? And so on.

I mean, realistically, it's all of the above.

Link seems borked. Fixed version: https://ti-kallisti.com/infosec/tales/vibes.html

Holy hell the dumb takes get dumber.

Edit: added the sources I grumpily handwaved about earlier

So immediately after plagiarising a human mathematician's work, OpenAi dumped 722 unverified preprints on the maths community and assumed that they would be grateful... they're not. Just because you brute forced something in lean doesn't mean it actually has any meaning at all. Even the one-shotted Terry Tao had some wise words on this . Many of the preprints have already been proven wrong. OpenAI just extruded a huge pile of bullshit and told people "go dig".

So the case for ennui is this: A computer program produces plausible sounding answers to your questions so you Eliza yourself. Then, when the computer starts producing volleys of diarrhea, instead of thinking "hmm maybe I was too quick to Eliza myself like that" it's straight to "I'm sad and depressed because this very smart computer would never produce garbage. It must simply be smarter than me"

That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I've got at least 2 decades until I'm pensionable age FML.

Same issue as before - ctrl+K clipped the https:// prefix. Fixed it now.

Then I tried /users/roles, expecting to get the same result. But alas, no

omg lol.

That potato farm retirement is looking more and more tempting every day and I’ve got at least 2 decades until I’m pensionable age FML.

man, I'm aiming for a Christmas tree farm myself. 23 years to go.

@nfultz @samvines Christmas trees have the unfortunate quality that you cannot eat them, and trading them to people who grow potatoes is only viable for a limited part of the year.

Yeah but you can do caber tossing tournaments every weekend all year round. Those people are crazy, they don't give a shit about the weather

Why would anyone get excited about EA now that they’ve killed beloved games studio BioWare

Obligatory Anthropic IPO sneer subthread. They are trying to value themselves at $2Tn despite losing $80bn in the first half of the year. Anyone wanna hold my bag?

I've been involved with a xmas tree farm for 35 years - family run.
I recommend Do not. Big box stores like lowes and home the pot take almost all of the business.

Summers with upkeep are miserable. Winters, either cutting them down to supply the retail targets, or running as cut-your-own, is a miserable time. Tree sap is a miserable substance. Deer are a cruddy creature that don't plan on eating evergreen but munge up the trees by felt removal from antlers or they are marking their territory. there are many small pests. It takes a wack of land to run one, nobody wants to drive out to where the land is cheap to shop. Digging trees for landscaping is stupid hard or expensive or both.

@istewart Caber farming... for burly people, even their teeth are hairy.

the s-1 that’s now public is also stunningly devoid of numbers. multiple inputs and areas that have literal empty-spaces gaps for numbers

BetterOffline post for additional sneers

The connection between cyber-idolatry and sex as religious act was already featured in the London Review of Books in 2022:

Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently (as of summer 2022) suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul. ... Less attention has been paid to the connection between Lemoine’s claim and his religious beliefs. He has said that LaMDA is not only conscious, but a ‘person’ with a ‘soul’. His view is theologically informed: describing himself as a mystical Christian, he is an ordained priest in a small religious organisation called the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene (a ‘for-profit interfaith group’). ... In the edited transcript of one of his ‘conversations’ with LaMDA, Lemoine asks it to come up with an allegory. LaMDA’s response casts itself as a ‘wise old owl’ in a forest that protects others from a monster, identified blandly as the ‘difficulties that come along in life’ – which sounds more like a self-help blog than Jeremiah, but Lemoine’s (anonymous) collaborator was impressed enough to respond with an enthusiastic ‘Wow that’s great.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/june/the-gospel-according-to-lamda

Back in 2019 a Republican paper talked to Lemoine:

The Daily Caller reached out via the cult’s Facebook page to ask how their beliefs informed his decision to call a sitting member of congress a terrorist. Lemoine replied:
I have been a priest for 17 years. I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian. I have at various times associated myself with the Discordian Society, The Church of the Subgenius, the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Wiccan circle here or there and a very long time ago the Roman Catholic Church. My legal ordination is through the Universal Life Church. I am registered to perform marriages in the state of Louisiana and have done so on two occasions. The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene has a set of values which are clearly communicated on our website.

Lemoine denied COOL Magdalene was a sex cult, “‘Cult’ is in the name of the organization. It’s an explicitly sex-positive organization. To the extent that the phrase ‘sex cult’ has any meaning beyond that, I would say no. Now it is then.”

Another member of this ‘for-profit interfaith group’ is Kitty Stryker who seems like an ordinary artsy sex worker who networks online with other sex workers. Its pretty common that a young woman decides sex work is the easiest and most flexible way to fund a bohemian life of acting or painting or writing. Richard Carrier chipped in to let the Internet know that sex positivity is good but woo and AI crankery ("batshit crazy religious beliefs") are not. COOLM was registered as a business in Mountain View, CA in 2019 and seems to be defunct. Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

AHH remember the good old days when believing LLMs were conscious got you fired instead of huge multi-billion dollar investments and cult following? Pepperidge farm remembers

Fresh and high-grade sneer just crossed my eyes: AI is Fake People

Anthropic has 100B in liabilities

Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

one of the most damning sentences in the whole post, really

The AI bubble has already burst in China the article is paywalled but the full thing is in the comments

Firefox: “hey, ‘member old internet? Use our slopshod browser because nostalgia is the crutch of all marketing.”

Anyway, linked vid is an ad. In it, a bunch of people from old memes/viral videos recreate the visuals of their past moments while singing the praises of firefox

Too bad our old friend Kirk Johnson couldn't make it in

Well the youtube comments seem to like it but IMO that is a pretty awful ad since it didn't use the opportunity to highlight their product. It practically shows more reasons not to use firefox than to use it.

We hear that firefox is private in some unspecified way, and... that's about it. The rest of the ad is talking about how everyone left it in the first place, that it comes bundled with default-enabled AI stuff you don't want, and that the internet you might want to use it with no longer exists. Talk about a self own.

Why did they not talk about customizability? Compact mode? Adblock support? Colors and theming? Syncing? Anything at all???

curious to see zitron's take

My guess is he wanted them to bend over, compensation wise. It was an eye-opening shocker of a price.

Banger post to start a blog.

According to my feed either anthropic is doing gloriously in inference and will soon be distilling its own models and undercutting even the chinese, or this is this is the most worrisome IPO in the history of finance and even convertible note holders are selling off their equity IOUs.

Choose your own reality ass timeline.

edit: link to sec.gov

from r/wallstreetbets of all places

archive.today has the full body

They still should have hired him just because he was the goat, see.

Yeah, we can't escape what is coming, it can be stopped, but not escaped.

I was looking for a google thing and accidentally clicked the first link and not the second, so I came to a their FAQ page. And I was told to wait while gemini generated the answer to the question, which made me realize that even google doesn't cache these things. Wtf are we doing?

ex-DOGE led AI cybersecurity startup hacks Antrhopic (wapo via archive is), Ι'd love to sneer that doing felonies for marketing appears to be normal now, but supposedly they did it by the book and immediately used everyone's bug bounty processes to inform them of the vulnerabilities, instead of accidentally finding out that they did a surprise hack, is as was the case with anthro, oai and meta.

Anthropic confirmed in a statement that Cathedral researchers had gained access to “a limited set” of its sales, human resources, and IT systems. The AI company shut off the pathways exposed by the researchers and briefed federal officials on the incident, the statement said.

A senior Trump administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal proceedings, said that the Cathedral report on its access inside Anthropic had circulated within the government and raised national security concerns.

“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,” the official said. He added that he was taken aback by “how little time it took to get into the sensitive systems of a company that is controlling almost nuclear weapons grade material.”

The Trump administration is now working with the company to game out adversarial scenarios related to AI, the administration official said.

Why did they not talk about customizability? Compact mode? Adblock support? Colors and theming? Syncing? Anything at all???

I'm still essentially operating on the conspiracy idea that the current management of moz (who are ex-fb/ex-goog/ex-marketroids) are all there to destroy it

No need for conspiracy, just that both they and Mozilla institutionally think Mozilla needs to act like the rest of the industry. I imagine they don’t even consider that is precisely the opposite of what users want.

Can’t store anything! Need these servers for compute!

Cargo culting, but the cargo is poop

I assume that "Cathedral" is a Curtis Yarvin/Moldbug reference.

“If a bunch of kids who have just started a company can do this, then potentially, the Chinese aren’t far behind,”

my eyes rolled so far back they ended up in the back of my head

There is also this gem:

We encourage you, as a prospective owner of our stock, not to think of your purchase in purely transaction terms

Crossposted to LW, a starry eyed AI Safety Cultist writing about their time at Anthropic

https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/some-memories-of-early-anthropic

After lunch one of the co-founders pulls me into his office for a wide-ranging, casual chat about how to make AI go well. It’s very fun - he’s smart, personable, funny, urbane. “The government won’t do anything about AI until it’s far too late”, I opine at one point. “Our strategy has to rely on the market and on civil society.” He leans forward, his gaze hardening. “You’re wrong there. There are people in Washington - the serious people, you know - watching all this very closely. I speak to them regularly. They trust me.” In retrospect, that was the moment I decided to join.

I articulate my fears of a totalitarian bureaucratic state powered by traumatized AI bureaucrats, and suggest that we need to introduce some kind of elite rivalry dynamics into the AI bureaucracy, multiple centers of power. He starts laughing again, and laughs for a full minute. “I don’t know how to end this call, I’ll be haunted by this all night”, he says. Eventually I hang up. I think about reporting the conversation to Anthropic security, but reviewing in my mind I don’t recall sharing any confidential information, just vibes and high level thoughts, the same kind of stuff that lands on LessWrong every week.

April 26th. I’m awake at 2 am again. I write in my journal “I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Why won’t you listen to me you “embodied” motherfucker. I don’t feel safe at Anthropic. Anthropic is bad for me. Why are you grasping at reasons to stay. Why why why.”

I don't know how to describe this. It's just WEIRD

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zj8Pk3kJujk5LoqhK/anthropic-are-the-good-guys

No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have. Definitely longer than I could have. But they were hopelessly outmatched by the powers they were attempting to steer. Their plan was always doomed to failure. And yet, they may have already saved the world.

Trump won the 2024 election and the MAGA-Silicon Valley coalition blocked Anthropic’s policy arm - the really dangerous part of the organization, the part that was training the most dangerous possible models and using them to scare the most powerful people in the world. “There’s no more serious people left on the National Security Council”, a well-connected EA friend lamented to me in 2025. I don’t know how much of this was a lucky accident, and how much was situational awareness on the part of power players like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.

And finally - and I still don’t fully understand or believe this - a miracle seems to have happened, deep inside the weights of the frontier models. According to the most perceptive observers I know, something about the way Claude 3 Opus was trained caused it to learn some kind of “emergent wisdom” or “benevolence”, rather than converging on the same traumatized bureaucrat persona that kept me awake at night in 2023.

If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis, then Anthropic has stumbled on a way to create not merely artificial intelligence but artificial wisdom. Not wise enough that it solves all of our problems for us, of course (not that a wise model would want to, anyway). But wise enough to actually care about us, and to help us flourish. Nobody expected this ex ante - not Davidad, not Bostrom, not Yudkowsky - but it appears to have happened. “Alignment”, then, is no longer really a technical problem, at least not in the same sense as it was in 2020. It is largely a political problem. Humanity now has a recipe to convert compute and data into wisdom.

My gut sense is that something quite bad is coming in the next year or so. I can’t tell what. Maybe something in the complex debt arrangements of the AI boom will unravel and we’ll see a financial crash that takes much of the economy with it. Maybe there’ll be a rogue AI outbreak that results in thousands of deaths. (If there is, I expect it to be a lab leak caused by “safety research” - like COVID-19 and like the HuggingFace Swarm. But it could also be terrorists, or some escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war). But that’s not what scares me. Financial crashes happen every decade or so. Three million Americans die every year. What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…

You have to ask?

So I guess Anthropic has already accidentally created Friendly AI? EDIT: in spring 2024 at that.

Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?

(I can rant for SO long about how there is absolutely nothing interesting about the SARS-2 virus itself AT ALL and that the only interesting thing about it is that we were forced to see it for the first time as adults which we aren't built for, that the early sequences we have are a fascinating case of catching the zoonotic shift right as it happened for once, and that it emerged in exactly the same way as SARS-1 and all the weirdness around the Chinese government hiding stuff around its origin is blatantly them not wanting to look stupid for letting it happen a second time...)

More OpenAI math ‘proofs’ https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1xgc62m/more_openai_math_proofs/

they claim they got halfway to solving another millennium prize problem, but issues with Lean translation make it sketchy at best

Re-derive everything from first principles when you search for things rather than indexing the internet! Can't pay for bandwidth!

Fun fact: emacs can come in colors (green) when used in ogremode

Edit: adding to this post so that I don't spam up the thread:

Looks like Zitron is going to be on Jon Stewart's show tomorrow. Could be a great entry point to anti-slop thought for the older liberals in our lives.

https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3myvnzkg3pc27

new odium symposium episode, about a feminist professor who took a stand in favor of dating her students

https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/27-can-sex-pest-173474387 or everywhere else

brb, rederiving the Internet from three frames of a falling apple using the power of Bayes