Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026
2026-04-12 23:00 UTC
Replies (30)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-13 18:02
ok the takes on the attempted firebombing of sama’s mansion are coming in from the rats and those that watch them. Credit to letting stuff marinate , I guess, and/or not working on a weekend no clue who this dude is, has a slobsuck with .ai domain but makes sense: www.campbellramble.ai/p/the-rational-conclusion Weird MtG scarecrow Zvi plays moral philosopher, invokes multiple authorities on Xhitter: …substack.com/…/political-violence-is-never-accep…
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@fnix@awful.systems 2026-04-13 15:36
Not really a sneer, just wondering what to make of it, if it doesn’t belong here please remove. The Financial Times goes with a study which ostensibly demonstrates that ca. half a million of potential coding jobs were directly eliminated by AI, not any other factors or general industry slowdown. The idea is it’s mainly junior positions which aren’t tightly “bundled” with other domains or just years of programming experience & intuition which are harder for AI to replace. So is AI really fully replacing juniors in the hundreds of thousands, or is there more going on?
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-04-13 07:09
Microslop exec floats the idea that companies should be required to buy additional software licenses for each AI agent “All of those embodied agents are seat opportunities,” Jha said, envisioning organizations with more agents than humans — each effectively a user that must pay for a software license, or “seat” in industry lingo. A company with 20 employees might buy 20 Microsoft 365 licenses today. If each employee gets five AI agents, and the workforce shrinks to 10 people, that could still mean 50 paid seats. Also, it’s apparently enough for an LLM endpoint to be paired with an email inbox to be considered an “embodied agent”, words mean nothing.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-04-14 12:02
 There is just something so inherently smug and annoying about Mollick. He is one of those low information boosters whose posts sound intellectual until you really think about them. Tell me more about how the pile of cursed spaghetti that is Claude code is now viable due to model breakthroughs. All I see are hype men saying “the new model is a team of PhDs in your pocket” and then releasing disappointing updates or saying “the new model is too dangerous” because they have some vaporware powered by human crowdsourcing. Also coding is not like other areas - you can test for hallucinations by compiling and printing and running tests. I guess my first mistake this morning was opening linkedin
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-13 18:04
LW stalwart discovers kids get sniffles from daycare, obviously this means women have to stay at home to take care of kids and not work: www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/daycare-illnesses BTW almost every person born after 1970 in Sweden has been to daycare as a kid, if daycare illnesses had long-term consequences it would be showing up here
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-14 22:22
Eliezer joins the trend of condemning “political” violence with confidence on the far end of the dunning-kruger curve: lesswrong.com/…/only-law-can-prevent-extinction I’ve already mocked this attitude down thread and in the previous weekly thread, so I’ll keep my mockery to a few highlights… He’s admitting nuke the data centers is in fact violence! It would be beneath my dignity as a childhood reader of Heinlein and Orwell to pretend that this is not an invocation of force. But then drawing a special case around it. But it’s the sort of force that’s meant to be predictable, predicted, avoidable, and avoided. And that is a true large difference between lawful and unlawful force. I don’t think Eliezer has checked the news if he think the US government carries out violence in predictable and fairly avoidable ways! Venezuela! The entire lead up to Iran consisted of ripping up Obama’s attempts at treaties and trying to obtain regime change through surprise assassination! Also, if the stop AI doomers used some clever cryptography scheme to make their policy of property destruction (and assassination) sufficiently predictable and avoidable would that count as “Lawful” in Eliezers book. If he kept up with the DnD/Pathfinder source material, he would know Achaekek’s assassins are actually Lawful Evil The ASI problem is not like this. If you shut down 5% of AI research today, humanity does not experience 5% fewer casualties. We end up 100% dead after slightly more time. His practical argument against non-state-sanctioned violence is that we need a total ban (and thus the authority of state driving it), because otherwise someone with 8 GPUs in a basement could invent strong AGI and doom us all. This is a dumb argument, because even most AI doomers acknowledge you need a lot of computational power to make the AGI God. And (violently) slowing down AGI might buy time for another sort of solution. Statistics show that civil movements with nonviolent doctrines are more successful at attaining their stated goals Sources cited: 0 One of the comments also pisses me off: Which reminds me about another point: I suspect that “bomb data centers” meme causal story was not somebody lying, but somebody recalling by memory without a thought that such serious allegation maybe is worthy to actually look up it and not rely on unreliable memory. “Drone strike the data centers even if starts nuclear war” is the exact argument Eliezer made and that we mocked. It is the rationalists that have tried to soften it by eliding over the exact details.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-04-14 14:59
new odium symposium episode is now available on all platforms. we look Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’s Gender Without Identity, a contemporary work of queer psychoanalytic theory. then we look at a case study in which it all goes wrong. www.patreon.com/posts/14-just-call-me-155052365 also we’re starting a discord for the podcast discord.gg/7tEEE39Fx also also we’re going to release our first subscriber episode next week, where we look at the pseudoscientists of paper repository viXra
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-15 07:50
To distract us from the ongoing cycle of violence and discourse about violence that neither cracks down or addresses it’s causes, may I offer the fruit of today’s YouTube rabbit hole: [youtu.be/Sb1RMuwbzhE](AI isn’t the future. It’s medieval alchemy)
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-15 13:22
New Blood in the Machine, about the escalating violence against the slop-mongers.
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@HotGarbage@awful.systems 2026-04-15 15:23
Fugly tech-bro shoe company pivots to AI, juicing stock. seattletimes.com/…/allbirds-soars-373-after-sneak…
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-04-15 15:25
www.cnbc.com/…/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400% I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place. The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday. Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter? Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-04-15 16:00
New polemics.md on the Altman molotov polemics.md/suspect-in-molotov-attack-on-sam-altm…
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-15 21:13
Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony. Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): old.reddit.com/…/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_… Via HN: old.reddit.com/…/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_…
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-15 22:54
A detailed analysis of why Anthropic’s claims about Mythos’s cybersecurity implications are bs: flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verif… And a followup post about why Anthropic’s Glasswing project violates cybersecurity community norms and is an attempt to form a cartel: flyingpenguin.com/cartel-or-not-anthropic-mythos-…
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-04-16 03:08
nakedcapitalism.com/…/ai-reputational-crisis-viol… The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken. haha That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians. oh :(
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-16 09:05
IRGC doing Yud’s work: Foreign Policy: Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom (archive link)
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-04-16 19:58
Anyone ever heard of these folks before? dataglow.energy On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc. I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-17 02:27
I’ve never seen a more compelling reason to enforce strict and short retention rules for every corp communication medium, holy shit forbes.com/…/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-17 03:20
Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but: I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from. Dsquareddigest responds: I believe the full quote is “to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose” It’s in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair’s famous line that “it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass”
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-17 22:56
The security blog I linked the other day has more criticisms of Anthropics mythos cybersecurity claims: -Apparently Opus 4.6 may have found the FreeBSD Anthropic has made a huge deal about Mythos finding? And Anthropic didn’t clarify that there older model had found the bug as well: flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-sugge… -More explanation about why Anthropic’s entire approach with Mythos and cybersecurity is more oriented around marketing than good (or any) cybersecurity practices. Also, the author makes the point that if you did have a tool that could rapidly refactor code into other languages, the solution to the vast majority of bugs and vulnerabilities Mythos found isn’t bug hunting one by one with Anthropic’s (much more expensive) LLM, it is to refactor code into a memory safe language. (I think the author is too credulous of LLM coding agents code quality here, but given those assumptions I think there point is correct.) flyingpenguin.com/how-sans-mythos-marketing-disap… -Bonus, MCP (model context protocol, a standard for tools for LLM agents Anthropic has developed and tried to push) is insecure by default and Anthropic has refused to fix it! flyingpenguin.com/ox-security-report-anthropic-mc…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-18 02:57
Twitter posts which mention stock symbols will now link to a trading app in Canada. Trading individual stocks is almost always a bad idea, even more so doing it based on social media post or the newspaper. betakit.com/wealthsimple-partners-with-elon-musks…
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-04-18 19:36
i’m in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn’t understand what makes REAL monarchism good: reddit.com/…/moldbug_morons_and_monarchism_an_xpo… someone in the replies asks the obvious question Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they’re supposed to do don’t happen? There’s more of everyone else than One Person.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-18 11:32
Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-17 22:49
Habryka defends colonialism, straight out, no qualifiers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend > Ok, fine, I'll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it. A surprisingly high number of comments push back, but Habryka's post is still highly upvoted, and the push back is in the typical rationalist jargon filled, assume-charitably mess.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-04-16 23:59
Some guys who steal other people's work choose to market their stolen wares using the name of a woman whose work was stolen. https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-rosalind/
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-13 17:41
Excited for the labor and contract law disputes that this will spawn when the model makes promises that the person won’t keep https://www.theverge.com/tech/910990/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-ai-clone But as as expected, this is another zuck project that doesn’t have the leg(itimation)s
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-13 06:52
There's a pretty wide divide between the speculations of the motives of the alleged arsonist of Sam Altman's SF residence last week. LW has handled the issue obliquely, but the main concern seems to be that they are pretty convinced the dude acted out of fear of AI-induced x-risk. The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light. HN (based on this big heap of comments ) is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione's attack on a health insurance CEO. (Searching for "exinction" and "doom" in the threads doesn't throw up much) Neither forum links to the dude's alleged slobslack. My conclusion is that "AGI-driven X-risk" is a position too extreme at the moment for HN. Also I believe the alleged attacker is not an avatar of a popular movement but a confused individual self-radicalized online. *Edit* It's good to know that __if__ you are a radicalized person thinking about committing violence against people or property, LW will be happy to provide you with a safe space to vent, with guarantees on your anonymity. C.f. habryka's comment here
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-13 17:32
[ai booster voice] if you last tried a head of AI more than six months ago, you need to try the new model. https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ska7kn/apples_ai_chief_john_giannandrea_departs_this_week/
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-13 17:13
There is research on evangelicals in the USA who interpret Trump tweets like their heretical pastors teach them to interpret the Bible. Is there something similar on the vast contradictory off-the-cuff social media outputs of people like Yud and Islamic treatment of the Hadiths?
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-04-19 16:15
i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp: archive.is/N20zm