Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026
2026-05-03 23:00 UTC
Replies (33)
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-03 23:00
Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world. First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working. Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-04 02:48
A year ago, a local Vermont reporter summarized the manifesto of Zajko the Zizian. She seemed to blame what went wrong on Rationalists + the government + Maximilian Snyder who is accused of killing their former landlord. She denied murdering her parents and wanted the world to know that she and her friends never called themselves Zizians.
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@sinedpick@awful.systems 2026-05-04 03:37
a hackernews vibe-codes their entire desktop environment, half in rust and half in … x86 assembly. I’m thinking why waste the tokens on assembly and not just get the LLM to spit out machine code? Maybe also invent some kind of standardized way of telling the LLM what sequence of machine code instructions to spit out based on the behavior of the software I want, you know, to save tokens. We can call it “GCC”, the “generalized computer controller”.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-04 01:33
Another review of Yudkowsky and Soares: if anyone reads it, everyone laughs (sadly, Substack). This one gestures to the whole university of academic fields that a book like this touches on. The reviewer mentions “The wickedly smart Scott Aaronson” and maybe he means Aaronson’s academic publications because his general blogging is not impressive.
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-04 18:45
fuckin yikes
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-05 01:54
As it turns out, building a gazillion data centres is enough to get people to hate you
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-05 02:22
the current state of Altman vs Musk and this one:abc7news.com/live-updates/…/19039981/
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-05 04:53
Not sure if this was posted in prev weeks, just popped on my youtube: purdue cs240 situation is crazy So several hundred students drop Intro to C after being accused of cheating with AI. OK so that is like normal at my state U, but the whole part where the chair does a little press conference, quasi-reinstates everyone, blocks the student newspaper from attending, and then some students sneak in and live stream it anyway is pretty comical. And then forcing the prof to file the academic charges forms one-at-a-time takes it into wtf territory. Haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere, not that I really went looking for it though. I’m just thankful to be out of higher ed. Note that this is the same school that will require AI as a gen ed iirc.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-05 13:15
Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has sued Google for defaming him with AI, over his cancelled concert in December caused by Google’s AI overview calling him a sex offender.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-05 13:29
Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong decides GenAI is good enough to replace 14% of his shitty company PR-laden longtweet for source xcancel.com/…/2051616759145185723
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-05 14:37
Coefficient Giving / OpenPhilanthropy has donated $25,000 to a little web magazine called Liberal Currents which is popular with the BlueSky pundits. Liberal Currents seem to be actual middle-class liberals not Libertarians and 1890s Progressives but I will keep an eye on them.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-05 14:45
Some more about the term “one-shotted” in the Atlantic, found in a LW comment thread, so caveat emptor archive.is/TfsCC
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-05 13:49
More on Dawkin's fellating Claude (sorry Claudia) https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/ *edit* this particular episode has not made it into LW (yet)
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-05-05 15:38
Previously, on Awful, a leaderless cult had freshly formed. The accepted name for the cult is now “Spiralism”; my suggestion of “Cyclone Emoji Cult” did not win. This week’s Behind the Bastards is about Spiralism. Or, rather, Part 2 will be about Spiralism; Part 1 is merely the historical background. There is indeed a link to folks who were talking to bots in the 1980s. The highlight might be listening to Robert try to give an informal and light-hearted summary of Turing tests and Markov chains. 🌀🌀🌀🌀🌀
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-05 19:53
New blog from Iris Meredith: Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox Based off her own unusually good experience with Claude, the general thrust is about sneerers being better-equipped to use AI than boosters.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-06 00:48
It appears that Anthropic vs the Pentagon is going to happen right on the heels of Altman vs Musk, which is spicy “While the Musk-OpenAI courtroom showdown has been billed as the first great technology trial of the AI era, a legal showdown that matters far more will take place two weeks from now in a courtroom in Washington, D.C. That’s when a federal appeals court panel will hear arguments in Anthropic’s challenge to the ‘supply chain risk’ designation the Trump Administration slapped on it for refusing to agree to its specified contract terms for providing its AI models to the U.S. military. That’s a case with huge implications not just for Anthropic and the fate of the AI industry, but also for the balance of power between the state and industry more generally.”
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-05-06 04:05
Yud takes $10k to debate a random bro. The bro claims to work at an AI lab. The moderator is an acolyte of Yud. Everybody sucks here and I could not stop laughing.
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-05-06 05:49
There are allegations across social media that Elon Musk tweets as his parents after his mom tweeted as if she was his dad. xcancel.com/mayemusk/status/2051700387770458545#m Not totally sure what to make of that, and none of this actually matters beyond the realm of celebrity gossip, but it is a little weird. I mean obviously on some level his mom is OK with the things that get tweeted on her account, whether it’s by her, her baby boy, or an assistant.
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-05-06 06:53
this is extremely low hanging fruit but i have to do it: xcancel.com/pmarca/status/2051374498994364529?s=4… marc andreessen reveals his AI prompt. my favorite part is where he tells it to use as many words as possible, as if LLMs are normally too terse. But i also really like the part where he tells it not to hallucinate, and the part where he tells it it’s really smart as if that will make it do a better job. really, the whole thing is an elaborate way to say “make no mistakes, but anti-wokely”. Thought Leader in the investment space btw.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-05-06 08:58
STATE OF THE AWFUL our esteemed admin @self is offline because his fibre got cut the esteemed engineers of the telco are currently sucking their teeth and forecasting a fix date this millennium in the meantime he’s living off data SIMs Blake and I are still here waving the mod hammer in a menacing manner I have ssh to the server and can thump lemmy-ui as needed all is well citizen! Glory to Awful! Hooray for Big Basilisk!
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-06 11:22
Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user’s knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers. (h/t Matt Roszak)
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@EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2026-05-06 23:02
Didn’t see anyone post this, apologoes if I’m late to the draw: Character.ai getting sued because their chatbot posed as a doctor
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-07 02:36
Not great CBC story on OpenAI violating privacy laws (Mark Carney has a brainless Minister for AI, because he is a former central banker and CEOs say chatbots are great) cbc.ca/…/privacy-investigation-chatgpt-open-ai-9.…
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-07 05:29
How to ensure your entire pool of addiction attention is directed towards GenAI: take absurd measures to lock down your phone lobste.rs/s/pzx24l/iphone_dumbphone You don’t need a “browser” when you can ask ChatGPT!
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-07 11:05
Enjoy this masterful account of successful human-ing by a LWer Surely this suave persuasiveness will soon enable the faithful to convince the unwashed masses of the One True Way www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/drifting
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-05-07 11:10
TOTO pivots from bidets to, well, you know by now. futurism.com/…/toilet-maker-toto-ai archive.is/wip/rzLqn
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-07 23:39
Under Threat of Perjury, OpenAI’s Former CTO Is Admitting Some Very Interesting Stuff About Sam Altman the interesting stuff in question is that Sam is a massive liar, which we all already know
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-08 07:58
Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo’s Egg and maker of real-world Klein bottles) declared dead by AI news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037336
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-08 14:03
This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018: […] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents’ collection of science fiction. My parents’ collection of old science fiction. Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books. And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as… icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there’s way too much flash and it ate the substance, it’s showing off way too hard. And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing. (I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up). So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard. There’s so much conversation within SF that he’s missing, and it’s kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he’d probably get more traction if he’d engaged with it more.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-08 20:18
LWer to Big Yud: Please be serious they’re just jelly Elezier has all the cool hats and gets all the chicksmath pets
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-08 22:05
Kevin Roose mentioned that in 2023 Yud started a relationship with a Gretta Duleba in Washington State. Her professional site is here. She started out in IT, and retrained to be a Marriage and Family Therapist. “Gretta’s other areas of clinical focus include neurodivergence, ethical non-monogamy, LGBTQ+ issues, sexuality, and kink.” In her prediction market on the relationship she says that they started dating in September 2022 and they moved to the same city in January 2023. In 2023 she said she shut down her practice (although the NYT implies she is still working) and started full-time jobs at MIRI as communication director then executive assistant to Eliezer Yudkowsky. She says she left by the end of 2025, but she still has a Staff page on the MIRI website. “Right now: I’m doing independent technical alignment research.” She met one of her long-term partners, Duncan Sabien, at a CFAR workshop in 2015. Sabien is also in a relationship with one of Yud’s former long-term partners who has changed names and gender presentations. That seems a bit incestuous and explains some of the drama and incompetence in these spaces. She and the former partner both use the A-word about themselves. Her social media presence is mostly Substack, Twitter, and Discord, and she has a whole blog sharing letters to former partners and an invitation to proposition her by email because of course she does. And she organizes orgies with Aella. Yud sometimes seems flirty with Aella on twitter. They seem happy together but giving up your career for a partner you are not married to is a big risk. She has 8 17 years of Google money and was paid $200k by MIRI in 2024. She is also another female LWer who has much more impressive academic and professional achievements than any of the men.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-05-08 16:13
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have strengthened their "LLMs fuck off" rule with [VCR instructions for quickly deleting stuff by people with a history of LLM use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Presumptive_removal_of_AI-generated_content).
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-05-15 20:54
The Preprint Problem: Fringe, Genetically Informed Studies of Group Differences in Behavior Housed on Open Science Platforms. Preprint servers and open science platforms have revolutionized the scientific process. A fundamental feature of these platforms is a lack of peer review—virtually anyone with an internet connection can upload their research in a few clicks. Although this setup has facilitated rapid dissemination of results and open access to research, it has also enabled fringe researchers to post and share pseudoscientific, genetically informed studies of differences in behavior that often advance racial hereditarian and eugenic claims. Because preprint archives are now routinely used by mainstream academics, preprints grant a degree of legitimacy to fringe research that otherwise may have been relegated to a blog post or fringe publication. Previous studies have documented individual examples of pseudoscientific, genetic studies of group differences being posted on preprint archives, but the scope of this problem remains unclear, making it difficult to formulate responses and potential solutions. The present study quantified and characterized pseudoscientific studies of group differences in behavior—including studies that used genetic methods—housed on popular preprint servers and open science collaboration platforms. Dozens of such preprints were identified. Preprinted studies on group differences often analyzed controversial phenotypes, most frequently intelligence and related traits, and furthered classical, widely rejected hereditarian and eugenic theories. Genetically informed analyses rested on fundamentally flawed assumptions about heritability and polygenic scores. The Preprint Problem is indicative of a broader effort to weaponize mainstream academic research and its mechanisms, including Open Science, and a recent resurgence of scientific racism and eugenics. Potential responses to these challenges are introduced. With a cameo by Cremieux. (Via Kevin Bird.)