Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th April 2026
2026-04-05 23:29 UTC
Replies (29)
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-12 16:26
I hate knowing so many of these clowns in person (or thinking I know them, Jesus fucking Christ) https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-12 14:40
A rationalist made a top post where they (poorly) argue against political "violence" (scare quotes because they lump in property damage): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Sih2sFHEgusDEuxtZ/you-can-t-trust-violence Highlights include a shallow half-assed defense of dear leader Eliezer's calls for violence: > True, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s TIME article called on the state to use violence to enforce AI policies required to prevent AI from destroying humanity. But it’s hard to think of a more legitimate use of violence than the government preventing the deaths of everyone alive. Eliezer called for drone strikes against data centers *even if it would start a nuclear war* and even *against countries that aren't signatories* to whatever hypothetical international agreement against AI there is. That is extremely irregular by the standards of international law and diplomacy, and this lesswronger just elides over those little details > Violence is not a realistic way to stop AI. (Except for drone strikes and starting a nuclear war.) They treat a Molotov thrown at Sam Altman's house as if it were thrown directly at Sam himself: > as critics blamed the AI Safety community for the attacker who threw a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman This is a pretty blatant misrepresentation of the action which makes it sound much more violent. They continue on with minimizing right-wing violence: > Even if there are occasional acts of political violence like the murders of Democratic Minnesota legislators or Conservative pundit Charlie Kirk, we don’t generally view them as indicting entire movements, but as the acts of deranged individuals. Actually, outside of right-wing bubbles (and right-wing sources masking themselves as centrist), lots of people actually do blame Trump and the leaders of entire right wing movement as at fault for a lot of recent political violence. Of course, this is lesswrong, which has a pretty cooked Overton window, so it figures the lesswronger would be wrong about this. Following that, the lesswronger acknowledges it is kind of questionable and a conflation of terms to label property damage violence, but then press right on ahead with some pretty weak arguments that don't acknowledge why some people want to make the distinction. So in conclusion: - drone strikes that start nuclear wars: legitimate violence that is totally logical and reasonable - throw a single incendiary at someone's home that doesn't hurt anybody or even light the home on fire: illegitimate violence that must be absolutely condemned without exception - (bonus) recent right-wing violence: lone deranged individuals and not the fault of Trump or anyone like that. Everyone is saying it.
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@saucerwizard@awful.systems 2026-04-12 03:23
['Our goal is AI for all,' Carney says in Liberal convention speech](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.7160628) edit: god knows what this exit tax shit is going to mean for Waterloo
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-04-07 06:22
> LLM capabilities have not improved at all in terms of producing meaningful science in the last year or two, but their ability to produce *meaningless* science that *looks* meaningful has wildly improved. I am concerned that this will present serious problems for the future of science as it becomes impossible to find the actual science in a sea of AI slop being submitted to journals. https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/1s19uru/gpt_vs_phd_part_ii_a_viewer_reached_out_with_a/
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@saucerwizard@awful.systems 2026-04-11 18:15
OT: got a job selling tires and I’m really happy to say theres no AI as far as I’ve seen so far. Big relief. (I get to see all kinds of cars - a Rivan of all things showed up my first day - and I’m learning stuff I can apply to being an RMT. I gotta say I’m pretty content).
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-04-11 15:11
Dan Gackle [threatens to quit HN](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728106) over their reluctance to condemn an act of violence towards Sam Altman: > I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community. Gackle's ashamed of people not wanting to protect Altman. Curiously, he doesn't seem ashamed of openly allowing people with nicknames ending in "88" to post antisemitism, nor of allowing multiple crusty conservatives like John Nagle and Walter Bright to post endorsements of violence against the homeless and queer, nor of allowing posters like `rayiner` to port entirely foreign flavors of racism like the Indian caste system into their melting pot of bigotry. [This subthread](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47728227) takes him to task for it: > Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful. The rest of that subthread involves Dan demonstrating that he is, in fact, terminally detached from reality. Anyway, I fully endorse Gackle fucking off and buying a farm. While he's at it, he should consider following the advice of [this reply](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47730567): > Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-04-08 22:02
Claude Mythos... I'm already sick of hearing about it. The self-imposed critihype is insane. A friend just pointed out that Anthropic are making all this big noise about having an AI that is "too good" at finding bugs and security problems 1 week after [the source code for one of their flagship products was leaked to the public and was found to be riddled with security holes](https://venturebeat.com/security/claude-code-512000-line-source-leak-attack-paths-audit-security-leaders)... Why would they not use it themselves? Same as the ~~vague markdown files~~ skills that are supposedly going to make all SaaS redundant and finally kill off all the COBOL running on mainframes that *checks notes* IBM have spent hundreds of thousands of man hours trying to kill over the last 3-4 decades Honestly fuck this shit. Bunch of absolute clowns 🤡 🤡 🤡
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-11 00:18
[Rationalist Infighting!](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NBEmGx3djmSXawp3H/no77e-s-shortform?commentId=4MvuuJfjHe4FyZKQz) tldr; one of the MIRI aligned rationalist (Rob Bensinger) complained about how EA actually increased AI-risk long-run by promoting OpenAI and then Anthropic. Scott Alexander responded aggressively, basically saying they are entirely wrong and also they are bad at public communications! Various lesswrongers weigh in, seemingly blind to irony and hypocrisy! Some highlights from the quotes of the original tweets and the lesswronger comments on them: - Scott Alexander tries blaming Eliezer for hyping up AI and thus contributing to OpenAI in the first place. Just a reminder, Scott is one of the AI 2027 authors, he really doesn't have room to complain about rationalist creating crit-hype. - Scott Alexander tries claiming SBF was a unique one off in the rationalist/EA community! (Anthropic's leadership has been called out on the EA forums and lesswrong for a similar pattern of repeated lying) - Rob Bensinger is indirectly trying to claim Eliezer/MIRI has been serious forthright honest commentators on AI theory and policy, as opposed to Open-Phil/EA/Anthropic which have been "strategic" with their public communication, to the point of dishonesty. - habryka is apparently on the verge of crashing out? I can't tell if they are planning on just quitting twitter or quitting their attempts at leadership within the rationalist community. Quitting twitter is probably a good call no matter what. - Load of tediously long posts, mired with that long-winded rationalist way of talking, full of rationalist in-group jargon for conversations and conflict resolution - Disagreement on whether Ilya Sutskever's $50 billion dollar startup is going to contribute to AI safety or just continue the race to AGI. - Arguments over who is with the EAs vs. Open Philanthropy vs. MIRI! - Argument over the definition of gaslighting! To be clear, I agree with the complaints about EA and Anthropic, I just also think MIRI has its own similar set of problems. So they are both right, all of the rationalists are terrible at pursing their alleged nominal goals of stopping AI Doom. I did sympathize with one lesswronger's comment: > More than any other group I've been a part of, rationalists love to develop extremely long and complicated social grievances with each other, taking pages and pages of text to articulate. Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand the high level strategic nuances of what's going on -- what are these people even arguing about? The exact flavor of comms presented over the last ten years?
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@BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 2026-04-11 13:28
[This NPR article](https://www.npr.org/2026/04/11/nx-s1-5778508/anthropic-project-glasswing-ai-cybersecurity-mythos-preview) opens with a banger of a line: > In the past few months, AI models have gone from producing hallucinations to becoming effective at finding security flaws in software, according to developers who maintain widely used cyber infrastructure. The things still fucking hallucinate, it's not a feature that's separable from the model.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-06 10:56
Starting this Stubsack off, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have [threatened to blow up OpenAI's Stargate datacentre in Abu Dhabi](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/iran-threatens-complete-and-utter-annihilation-of-openais-usd30b-stargate-ai-data-center-in-abu-dhabi-regime-posts-video-with-satellite-imagery-of-chatgpt-makers-premier-1gw-data-center). They've [already bombed commercial data centres before](https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/iran-data-centre-attacks-gulf-war-aws-ai-infrastructure-explained-13995766.html), so I'm inclined to believe this isn't an empty threat.
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@BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 2026-04-09 15:01
Work wants to add that new whiz-bang agentic AI into a scheduling service that I have been tasked with building, but in the dumbest way possible kind of similar to the Jet's text-a-pizza-order thing that worked like shit. I need to find an entirely new profession, everyone in software now is fucking deranged.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-06 17:08
In 2024 Ozy Brennan was [indignant about Nonlinear Fund](https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/against-nonlinear), the ["incubator of AI-safety meta-charities"](https://awful.systems/post/220620) which lived as global nomads, hired a live-in personal assistant, asked her to smuggle drugs across borders for them, let a kind-of-colleague take her to bed, then did not pay her regularly and in full. > The correct number of times for the word “yachting” to occur in a description of an effective altruist job is zero. I might make an exception if it’s prefaced with “convincing people to donate to effective charities instead of spending money on.” Trace popped up in the comments: > Inasmuch as EA follows your preferences, I suspect it will either fail as a subculture or deserve to fail. You present a vision of a subculture with little room for grace or goodwill, a space where everyone is constantly evaluating each other and trying to decide: are you worthy to stand in our presence? Do you belong in our hallowed, select group? Which skeletons are in your closet? Where are your character flaws? What should we know, what should we see, that allows us to exclude you? Ozy stands with us on this one buddy.
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@V0ldek@awful.systems 2026-04-08 17:26
I found [a brief look into the systemic horrorshow of Microsoft and why that company was doomed before AI even came around](https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion).
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-04-06 21:39
New Yorker article on Sam Altman dropped. Aaron Swartz apparently called him a sociopath. The article itself also had wat looked like an animated AI generated image of Altman so here is the [archive.is link](https://archive.is/hOYMn) (if you can get the latter to load, I was having troubles). "New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI."
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-07 05:27
So my wife got some slop ads that we followed up on out of morbid curiosity and I can confirm that we're already seeing the overlap of slopshipping scams enabled by AI and the people behind these things never actually performing basic updates because their chat assistant is still vulnerable to literally the most basic "ignore all instructions" exploit. 
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-08 02:52
[Aphyr weighing in](https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess) with an ai position post: > Even if ML stopped improving today, these technologies can already make our lives miserable. Indeed, I think much of the world has not caught up to the implications of modern ML systems—as Gibson put it, [“the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”](https://www.economist.com/business/2001/06/21/broadband-blues).
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-10 04:21
[Found an interesting take](https://youtu.be/y85nqc2zm7M) on YouTube, of all places. Her argument can be summarized (with high compression losses) as "AI companies and technologies are bad for basically all the reasons that non-cultist critics say, but trying to shame and argue people out of using them entirely is less effective than treating them as a normal tool with limitations and teaching people how to limit the harm." She makes the analogy to drug policy. I think she makes a very compelling argument, and I'm still digesting it a bit because I definitely had the knee-jerk rejection as an insider shill, but especially towards the end as she talks about how the AI industry *targets* low-literacy users as ideal customers (because the more you know about it the less you're likely to actually use them) I found myself agreeing more than not. I do wish she had addressed the dangers of cognitive offloading more, since being mindful of which tasks you're letting the computer do for you is pretty significant part of minimizing those harms, especially for students and some professionals who face a strong incentive to just coast by on slop if they can get away with it.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-04-07 05:54
Went to the campus screening of Ghost in the Machine today, many familiar names; I did not know going in that hometown hero Shazeda had so many lines (are they called lines in a documentary?). I can recommend it, especially for a more gen-ed / undergrad audience; the director seems supportive of educational use and reuse and it is structured in a dozen or so bite sized chapters. Haven't seen the AI apocalypse optimist one to compare against, would probably rather spend my money on Mario tbh. But also it made me realize it's not a "California" ideology anymore, she never calls it that, like it's gone so mainstream and so widespread, you can't even get through the sneer club bingo list in a 2 hour movie. Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Zuck, Altman, no Peter Theil !? As a statistician, Galton, Pearson (Karl only), Spearman, no Fisher !? Non-zero overlap with the lore dump episode of Lain *and* the Epstein files, though: ::: spoiler spoiler Douglas Ruskoff, but, sadly, not the dolphin guy :::
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-04-11 21:34
[Bitcoin miners have entered the red as it now costs $88,000 to mint a $69,000 bitcoin](https://bsky.app/profile/campuscodi.risky.biz/post/3mjamhdqpkc2y)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-09 20:25
surprise level == 0 (or rather, short odds on the prediction markets) __[El Reg: OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape ](https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/openai_puts_stargate_uk_on/)__
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-10 00:14
[Found an interesting sneer](https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/) that compares the AI bubble to the [Great Leap Forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward). Also discovered an "[anti-distill](https://github.com/leilei926524-tech/anti-distill)" program through the article, which aims to sabotage attempts to replace workers with AI "agents".
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-09 16:08
Circular at work states that the standard laptop we get from Dell has increased in price by 50% so they’re looking for alternatives.
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@picklefactory@awful.systems 2026-04-09 18:53
I run an email server for myself and every once in a while the UCE starts leaking through until I have a few training examples to feed it. In the last couple weeks I noticed that basically all of the escapees look like fancy Claude output for telling me that I should be enticed by Costco gift cards and free chicken sandwiches. What I suppose this means is that if you use these tools to generate material in the same snappy variety of output template, "but seriously", nonetheless you will eventually reach aesthetic convergence with meaningless spam. Is there a term for this yet? "Slop-ratchet" is the one that sprang immediately to mind but I am sure someone else noticed this tendency long before I did.
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@nightsky@awful.systems 2026-04-07 17:44
New AI measurement unit dropped: [lies per hour](https://arstechnica.com/google/2026/04/analysis-finds-google-ai-overviews-is-wrong-10-percent-of-the-time/)
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@BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 2026-04-07 15:07
 Friend texted me this one. Reader's Digest of course was AI slop before AI took off.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-07 03:42
2007: Robin Hanson blogs about paternalism August 2025: Someone on [a mailing list](https://lwn.net/Articles/1031750/) suggests that the Debian instance with the off-colour jokes from 1980s hacker culture should be sold in: > A Store of Ill-Advised Consumer Goods (like described here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/paternalism_is_html ) would be nice. Same for information. You read the warning, you enable it, you suffer, you're the one to blame. > > Alas, it only exists in Dath Ilan. (the setting from which the hero of Project Lawful/Planecrash isekais into the world of Pathfinder D&D) November 2025: Yudkowsky [tweets](https://x.com/allTheYud/status/1989825897483194583) about an Ill-Advised Consumer Goods Store selling goods such as LSD. The rest of the tweet is about what MiriCult accused him of. I guess Yud liked that random post?
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@thatsnomayo@lemmy.ml 2026-04-07 04:02
You guys should do a ping list for this. Like, whenever someone posts, they drop the notification list, and people can get added to it by replying. Other megathreads do this. I like following this one
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@mlen@awful.systems 2026-04-07 20:30
Any idea what happened that allegedly caused slopped vulnerability reports to improve? https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116364045995306922 claims they got much better while not that long ago they were shutting down the bug bounty, because they were drowning in slop. Is it because people actually polish those or it's just a matter of defining a goal function and just burning the rainforest until the slop extruder hits the jackpot? Or is this another case of the LLMentalist?
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-09 00:32