Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th April 2026
2026-04-19 23:00 UTC
Replies (23)
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-20 09:00
shot: chaser:
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-04-20 11:07
Somebody check if Sam’s got a pied-a-terre in NYC that’s gonna be taxed under this new proposal
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-20 12:27
Look I know Doctorow fails the gen-AI purity test but I think he’s making sense here pluralistic.net/2026/04/16/pascals-wager/
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-20 13:05
Habryka @ LW takes a break from inventing Western civilization from first Rat principles to advocate a RETVRN to incandescent lighting: Eventually, in most of the western world outside of the US, incandescent lightbulbs were literally banned to promote energy saving policies. This was the greatest uglification in history. Within two decades, much of the world that was previously filled with beautiful natural-feeling light started feeling alien, slightly off, and uncomfortable, and societal stigma around energy-saving policies prevented people from really doing anything about it. lesswrong.com/…/if-a-room-feels-off-the-lighting-…
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-04-20 14:28
New random positivity thread: awful.systems/post/8018168
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-04-20 21:44
guys
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@JFranek@awful.systems 2026-04-21 05:11
Looks like Mythos didn’t catch this one: Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop Whoopsie!
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-22 12:23
Habryka doesn’t have time to write all the crazy shit he’s mulling on, so he offers a summary. lesswrong.com/…/posts-i-don-t-have-time-to-write Do you enjoy living in a society that takes fire safety seriously? Sucks to be you, I guess: Fire codes are the root of all evil How about we just make all the mosquito nets flammable. That’s effective altruism! Also Switzerland is a libertarian paradise apparently.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-22 15:11
Is there a more generalized form of “weird hill to die on but at least you’re dead”? Because a new-to-me way for too-rich people to end their gullible lives has emerged technologyreview.com/…/r3-bio-brainless-human-clo…
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-22 15:14
Two tech-related links for today, both relating to fascism. First, tante has a new blogpost about AI being overtly fascist in nature, which he’s also posted to LinkedIn, seemingly for kicks. (Found on red site, too) Second, the Nazi laptop company has sent a second pre-release laptop to DHH, showing they have not changed at all since they went full fash six months ago:
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-04-22 15:52
…substack.com/…/and-the-alignment-problem-what-ch… In June 2025, Zhao Tingyang gave a talk at Tsinghua’s Fangtang Forum. The edited transcript ran in The Paper on July 4 under the title “人工智能的伦理与思维之限” (The Ethical and Thinking Limits of AI). Near the end, Zhao wrote this: “What requires more reflection is that attempting to ‘align’ AI with human nature and values actually contains a risk of human species suicide. Human nature is selfish, greedy, and cruel. Humans are the most dangerous biological species. Almost all religions demand the restraint of human desire; this is no accident. AI aligned with human values may well become a dangerous subject by imitating humans. Originally, AI does not possess the selfish genes of carbon-based life, so AI is actually closer to the legendary ‘human nature is fundamentally good’ kind of existence, whereas human nature is not ‘fundamentally good.’” The alignment paradigm treats human values as the target AI should conform to. Zhao is arguing the target is the danger. An AI aligned to human values inherits the specific features of human judgment that Zhao says have produced the record of human harm. The paradigm is not incomplete. It is pointed the wrong way. Zhao’s argument has developed across CASS, The Paper, and Wenhua Zongheng from late 2022 through 2025, from a provocative aside into a sustained critique of the alignment paradigm. In the same period, the English-language alignment and AI ethics literature produced no substantive engagement. No citations. No rebuttal. No naming. Zhao is a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Philosophy, author of the Tianxia framework, and one of the most cited philosophers working in Chinese today. I need to think on this a little more, wasn’t on my radar.
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-04-23 03:41
Friend of Ziz and cofounder of the ‘rationalist fleet’ pops up out of the woodwork trying to clear their name lesswrong.com/…/re-introduction-of-a-rationalist-… Honestly, the bizarreness that immediately comes to mind is not the things I notice most. “I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death (and bring people back if I could) and that I would become a dragon and help generally facilitate a fantastical transhumanist future.” “I dream of non-Euclidean geometries, of countless worlds visible and accessible in the daytime sky, of competent infrastructure, of soul forges continually working to bring back the dead… I dream of reaching through warps in the spacetime fabric to save the dying across time” “Signed, the dragon of creation Creatrei (cree-AH-trey) also known as Gwen Danielson or as Char and Astria (when referring to my hemis as distinct individuals)” The links to old plans to build RVs with local copies of archived internet to keep doing AI research when industrial civilization collapses by 2025 are interesting too. The reactions are fun. “This post is not actually doing a good job of making me trust you and think this conversation is safe to have[1], and I notice that as I am saying this that I am afraid that this will now somehow result in someone trying to murder me in my sleep”
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@EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2026-04-23 04:12
Semi-topical, there’s a new Local 58 and even the moon demon hates AI, I guess.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-23 09:13
I’m no fan of Greg Egan’s fiction but I am a fan of him pissing of rats: lesswrong.com/…/an-angry-review-of-greg-egan-s-di… Link to short story: www.gregegan.net/DIDICOSM/Complete/Didicosm.html also lesswrong.com/…/comment-on-death-and-the-gorgon (shared in a comment to the above) Here’s the short story that pissed Zack off: asimovs.com/wp-content/…/DeathGorgon_Egan.pdf
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@macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-23 20:41
theintercept.com/…/chatgpt-ai-false-confession-in… “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?” I don’t have words for how stupid this is.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-04-23 22:37
Emile Torres and me, rationalist enemies list #3 and #1. a photo to strike fear into the utility functions of rationalists everywhere circumstances.run/…/116456408676175449 pic by my kid and from the premiere of Ghost in the Machine, an awesome documentary. I’m in it. tl;dr AI was always olde timey race science all the way down
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-24 21:01
presented without further comment, this remarkable piece of political advice www.lesswrong.com/…/eric-neyman-s-shortform?comme…
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-25 23:10
This week in unsettling AI ads. The algorithms feed me variants on this one pretty frequently, always with some fantasy woman offering to be your best friend and definitely not maybe give you dirty pictures. “Normal human woman tied up in a basement” is new, though, and even skeezier than usual. I don’t know what the workflow is for these or whether there’s an actual person writing the prompts for this, and I don’t think there’s any answer that would make me less uncomfortable about it.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-04-25 19:04
Another lament about the tech industry has come to my attention, as Ky Decker asks themselves “Do I belong in tech anymore?” Pretty solid piece all around, recommend checking it out
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-04-26 16:51
You thought software quality was poor before LLMs? You ain’t seen nothing yet. Typical mentality on the orange site: I don’t think I’ve read a single line of code I’ve shipped in over 6 months.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-04-25 19:57
Saw a remarkable take on the pro-AI parts of bsky, that since DeepSeek420.69 can offer the model at like 15% of Claude's pricing, that must mean that Anthropic is operating at an at least 80% positive margin on inference, so things will work out. In the same thread they complained about Zitron's math being dodgy.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-20 01:54
[Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company iLearningEngines charged with fraud](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ex-ceo-ex-cfo-bankrupt-ai-company-charged-with-fraud-2026-04-17/) - Reuters, 17 April 2026 > Prosecutors said iLearning marketed itself as an artificial intelligence-driven digital education company with an "out-of-the-box AI platform," and claimed to earn revenue mainly by selling licenses for its educational and training platforms to customers, including healthcare companies and schools. > > According to the indictment, the defendants used forged sham contracts to make it seem that iLearning's customers were real, and used "round trip" transfers of investor and lender funds -- meaning they sent money to purported customers, who then returned it to iLearning -- to manufacture revenue. > > **At least 90% of iLearning's $421 million of reported revenue in 2023 was fabricated**, the indictment said. I think they called this wash trading in cryptoland.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-04-20 16:49
Reminder to update your github settings if you don't want AI to train on it, before [24 april](https://bsky.app/profile/joesondow.bsky.social/post/3mipll3bi7c2p).