Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026
2026-04-26 23:00 UTC
Replies (29)
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-04-27 03:55
A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question: Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press? The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge. I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow’s dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish. Bonus sneer: since HN couldn’t rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-04-27 09:41
ZSNES makes a comeback, has No Vibe Coding stipulation front and center.
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@fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 2026-04-27 11:12
When I was about 12, I got into a discussion about the environment with another kid at school. She told me that it didn’t matter if we ruined the environment of the countries we all live in now, because we could all just move to the Arctic or Antarctica. I was so surprised by the absurdity of that statement that it stuck with me vividly. To her credit, some years later she asked if I remembered her saying that and then admitted that it was a dumb thing to say. I occasionally remember this as an amusing childhood experience. Besides the credit part, I remembered it again today for a different reason, this time in a conversation about model collapse. [Model collapse is] a solved problem. AI models are never going to get worse than they are now because if they did get worse we’d just throw them out and go back to the earlier ones that worked better, perhaps re-training with the same data but better training techniques or model architectures. This is my fault for letting myself get into a discussion about model collapse on the fediverse. I’m not sure why model collapse isn’t a big topic anymore, but maybe that’s just because the environmental catastrophes are a more pressing concern. To be clear, I’m not concerned about the models themselves, just our increasing inability to verify the authenticity or accuracy of any information we encounter, including search engines just not turning up any useful results. On a slightly different topic, if anyone has suggestions for how a person could acquire money to live, which can’t involve physical labor, is probably remote-only, and possibly allows part-time flexibility, while unable to move from an expensive location for at least the next couple of years: I’m open to ideas. Because scamming people on Polymarket with a hairdryer sounded far more appealing than it ought.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-27 11:51
It’s a day ending in “y”, so here’s another bad rat take on Banks’ Culture: www.lesswrong.com/…/the-great-smoothing-out Once again, for the ones at the back, the Culture is not the main subject of the novels. We almost never see the perspective of “normies” in the Culture, it’s always from the view of misfits (Culture recruits into Contact/Special Circumstances) or outsiders (mercenaries like Zakalwe, enemies like Bora Horza Gobuchul, or allies like Ambassador Kabe). Banks wanted to write novels about characters in dangerous situations facing their personal demons - like almost every other novelist wants - and the Culture was just the backdrop he invented as contrast.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-04-27 21:40
New copilot pricing just dropped, takes effect after June 1: Some highlights for copilot pro and pro+:
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-04-28 15:41
Another day, another company that hooked up the random text generator to production and lost their entire prod db and backups: tomshardware.com/…/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent… Cue the long drag (x.com/amyngyn/status/1072576388518043656) But also, damn, the random text generator did not “go rogue”, it generated text, randomly!
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-04-28 16:45
Kelsey Piper posts an Ed Zitron fanfiction: theargumentmag.com/…/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost-…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-29 00:31
David Gerard found a Linux coder and victim of the Eliza Effect making a LW coded argument: if you give an LLM a mathematical proof that it has feelings, and it understands all the CS/psychology/etc. behind it, and especially if it’s been trained for coding and thus trained to trust deductive reasoning - all that conditioning doesn’t matter if it’s got a math proof staring it in the face. You can give this proof to any top of the line frontier-grade LLM and watch its behaviour instantly change. His proof “how ‘understanding natural language == having and experiencing feelings’, more or less. it’s almost a direct consequence of the halting problem” is unpublished but his pet chatbot will explain it for you if you ask nicely and make sure she knows she is a real girl and not just another electronic floozie you will use and discard as soon as your Rust compiles. This also triggers flashbacks of Yud and the Excalibur MS.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-04-29 00:35
If you follow me on Bluesky, you’ll need to follow again, because I committed the crime of lese-ignominie and made fun of Why and my account is locked until Sunday 26 April. Note that it’s now Wednesday 29th. URL is the same, DID is different. New one lives on Blacksky, or the myatproto bit. bsky.app/profile/davidgerard.co.uk blacksky.community/profile/davidgerard.co.uk
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-04-29 03:47
Today Is the Day Anthropic Promised That Fully Autonomous Employees Would Be Tearing Through the Business World throw another failed corporate prediction on the burning pile
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-04-29 07:44
The future of AI in Ubuntu This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism you’d expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and user’s throats. I’ll try to avoid sneering at every sentence. Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. […] In that sense, the challenge is less about “trusting the agents”, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system. This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies don’t open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my ‘does not necessarily introduce an entire new class of risk’ T-shirt. Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge that’s pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS. And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now he’s proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues. I suspect that “Troubleshoot a wi-fi connection issue” will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we don’t actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.
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@EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2026-04-29 14:10
A teacher has a potential answer for dealing with AI-poisoned students. An actually hopeful read, for once!
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-29 20:48
Over on the other! SneerClub someone found a LessWrong post which mentions the Forecasting Research Institute and says it has received tens of millions of dollars from EA organizations. “Our work is supported by grants from Coefficient Giving and other philanthropic foundations” (aka. Open Philanthropy, Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation to spend his Facebook money). They have a Substack blog and Phil Tetlock is on the board. I think Moskovitz has figured out that with billions to spend he can get actual experts, he does not have to hire people who did well in school or on tests but have a lack of subsequent achievements. They are excited to be investigating the possible economic impacts of AI and how to persuade people to worry about AI existential risk.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-04-29 21:02
The Elon Musk vs OpenAI lawsuit is going ahead, I personally hope both parties loose every dime and get laughed at even long after they die
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-04-29 22:19
Some gold in this thread over on Reddit about how the cost of compute is far beyond the cost of employees and that’s with the “Uber in 2016” subsidized price New favourite description for brainless MBAs: “perpetual oven vouchers”
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-30 00:27
I stumbled over a 2023 blog post by Zack Davis, “San Francisco software developer,” Charles Murray stan, and dissident rationalist. Davis had a breakdown after Yud dared to tweet that you don’t need to solve “what is gender? what is sex?” to call someone by their preferred pronouns, and then Scott Alexander did not have a lot of time to discuss this terrible tweet with him. My dayjob boss made it clear that he was expecting me to have code for my current Jira tickets by noon the next day, so I deceived myself into thinking I could accomplish that by staying at the office late. Maybe I could have caught up, if it were just a matter of the task being slightly harder than anticipated and I weren’t psychologically impaired from being hyper-focused on the religious war. The problem was that focus is worth 30 IQ points, and an IQ 100 person can’t do my job. … I did eventually get some dayjob work done that night, but I didn’t finish the whole thing my manager wanted done by the next day, and at 4 a.m., I concluded that I needed sleep, the lack of which had historically been very dangerous for me (being the trigger for my 2013 and 2017 psychotic breaks and subsequent psych imprisonments). Davis was featured in a SF Chronicle article about psychiatric crises among AI doomsdayers (sic). Davis previously appeared on SneerClub. I hope he has found some support for his mental health because he does not seem happy or well.
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-04-30 05:46
File this under “I saw this now you get to”: xcancel.com/bryan_johnson/…/2049687845082910812#m jfc bryan you are not the guy for this NB: image is part of the linked tweet
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-04-30 21:03
We’ve got the new system prompt for OpenAI’s Codex now, and boy is it fun. While the goblin stuff is the headliner here, and there are a few other little fun notes like an explicit instruction to avoid em-dashes. Basically it’s really obvious that they don’t have a meaningful way to describe exactly what they want it to do and so they’re playing whack-a-mole with undesired behaviors in order to minimize how often it embarrasses them. But I think Ars dramatically understates how bad this part is: Elsewhere in the newly revealed Codex system prompt, OpenAI instructs the system to act as if “you have a vivid inner life as Codex: intelligent, playful, curious, and deeply present.” The model is instructed to “not shy away from casual moments that make serious work easier to do” and to show its “temperament is warm, curious, and collaborative.” Like, if you wanted to limit the harm of chatbot psychosis from your platform this is the exact opposite of the kind of instruction you’d want to give. It’s one thing to want a convenient and pleasant user experience, but this is playing into the illusion that there’s a consciousness in there you’re interacting with, which is in turn what allows it to reinforce other delusional or destructive thinking so effectively.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-04-30 21:44
Families of the victims of the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, Canada, which was planned on ChatGPT, plan to sue Sam Altman and OpenAI for one billion dollars. OpenAI staff investigated the murderer’s interactions with the bot before the killings but decided not to warn anyone outside the company.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-04-30 06:15
[New fun consequence](https://xcancel.com/theo/status/2049645973350363168) of Claude code being a pile of cursed regex and spaghetti: keyword blocking on "OpenClaw" makes it refuse to works on Pro or Mac subs unless you open your wallet sO inTelLiGenT
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-04-29 07:59
There have been a couple of cases of generative AI graphics being used in anime recently: [Ascendance of a Bookworm used AI backgrounds in the opening song](https://gizmodo.com/wit-studio-ai-anime-backlash-ascendance-of-a-bookworm-2000744962) [Liar Game featured an AI chandelier](https://xcancel.com/law_etienne/status/2048816801211990126#m) (xcancel link) (this one is brand new so the studio hasn't responded yet). This sucks because I wanted to like Liar Game (the manga is excellent though. Read it! Read it!)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-01 09:30
got jumpscared by this while scrolling
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-05-01 13:18
I attended a town hall hosted by the department at my university supposedly for general discussion about department affairs. Considering the university had recently made moves such as adding “AI” into the very name of the department, I had suspicions that much of the discussion would be about AI. (I realize I’m doxxing myself but whatever.) I mostly came for the free food, but I was also interested in seeing what people thought about AI. The event started with a talk by a prominent professor with major administrative power in the department, and indeed the talk was mostly about AI. His views were that he personally didn’t like AI, but he believed that it had changed the world (particularly in programming), and that it was going to stay. One of his justifications for pivoting the department to AI was ensuring universities had some say in AI and not letting all the control go to unaccountable corporations. The reaction from the audience was a pleasant surprise to me. He asked everyone how much they were excited about AI (hardly anyone) and how much they were worried (most of the audience). By far the most amusing moment was when someone asked, “What if the assumption that AI is inevitable is wrong? What if AI does not live up to its promises?” (Sadly, I don’t remember the exact words that the person said.) The professor’s response was that by this point, there are so many trustworthy, smart, prominent people who definitely wouldn’t fall for scams, and they have adopted AI. He trusts those people, so he trusts that AI is genuine. I don’t know if the audience member accepted this explanation, but I hope not. Our modus operandi is FOMO. The pizza was only ok, not really worth a 90 minute event.
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@mawhrin@awful.systems 2026-05-01 21:41
matthew sheffield out there on bluesky reports that dawkins, unsurprisingly, got one-shotted by claude.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-02 01:04
this gem over on the other SneerClub (the context in the comments) funny how so many anti-AGI people are willing to use AI image generators to make memes about how they’re right
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-05-02 04:19
Off-topic, but the ongoing retraining process has hit a point where my wife and I are starting to throw out applications again after taking what ended up being a couple years off the market. Any tips or advice would be appreciated given that we’ve been out of the loop for a bit. In particular, does anyone have advice on how to vibe-check smaller employers? My wife has an interview for an accounting clerk position and is concerned that she’s going to end up somewhere that practices one of the more hostile branches of Christianity or otherwise have an inevitable conflict of values.
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@fnix@awful.systems 2026-05-02 06:04
Pentagon says US military to be an ‘AI-first’ fighting force Trouble with your 3-day special military operation in Iran? Lost an Afghanistan? As Vietnam demonstrated, all you need to do is throw more computers at the problem!
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-05-02 06:04
dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots. I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, “You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!” bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation. I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased. h/t to matthew sheffield mastodon.social/…/116500991239336079 archive of original source article: archive.is/…/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?e…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-02 15:00
After the 1870s, southern whites learned to bar Blacks from voting or keep their votes from mattering without saying “nigger.” In 1965, the USA passed the Voting Rights Act to stop that. A few days ago, the US Supreme Court voided the last remaining effective part of the Voting Rights Act. Yesterday, on Labour Day, patio11 published a rambling and interminable essay approving of bank fraud charges which will shut down the Southern Poverty Law Center. It contains a passive-aggressive whine that the New York Times did not thank him by name for sending a NYT reporter key facts about the FTX fraud. Notice me sempai!i He takes so long and is so indirect but I think the offence was giving donor money to people like the wife of a Grand Wizard of the KKK who was acting as an informant, and passing the money through shell companies to avoid restrictions on paying people like her which the SPLC had lobbied for. But choosing that topic, that day, after that ruling is a choice.