Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026
2026-05-10 23:00 UTC
Replies (32)
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-11 04:23
In January, Scott Alexander had another crisis of faith: to paraphrase, I cared almost as much about prediction markets as I care about racist lies, but we got prediction markets and why are they not doing much? Maybe I need to keep faith and Friend Computer will be so powerful that we don’t need prediction markets?
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-11 16:46
Galloway closes with a pretty strong sneer: Apocalypse No AI’s popularity is correlated to wealth, with only those earning more than $200,000 per year viewing AI as a net positive. That’s not a reflection on AI, but yet another signal that the incumbents (the old and the wealthy) have successfully hoarded opportunity. In other words, the AI jobs freak-out is the latest act in America’s ongoing wealth inequality drama. The Gini coefficient is how economists measure inequality: Zero indicates everyone has exactly the same wealth; a score of 1.0 means one individual owns everything. In the U.S., we’re higher than 0.8 — about the level seen when the French began separating people from their heads. The real disruption won’t come from AI, but from the public watching arsonists sell smoke detectors and call it innovation. The AI job apocalypse isn’t an economic forecast — it’s a marketing strategy. We’re not witnessing the end of work. We’re watching the monetization of fear. Seems like he’s getting back to his pre-crypto / we-wtf style. But when did podcasters start charging $53 / seat at the Wiltern, that place is huge. And no Swisher either, it’s his other one.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-05-11 17:25
Shot: a satirical incident report Chaser: Google AI summary treats it as serious
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-11 18:15
In September 2024, someone in Bay Area Rationalism with the handles segfault, kryptoklob, and klob posted beefs with a prominent rationalist and mentionde that someone was trying to hide his “Adderall medication”. The comments include things like: Hey, a brief update for anyone who wasn’t paying attention. since he posted this, (the person posting the beef) managed to rack up 5+ restraining orders, a knife charge, aggrevated stalking charges, and more.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-11 22:58
PS3 emulator RPCS3 has put up some guardrails against slopcode, and responded to the AI bro shitfits by sneering them: Bonus response:
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-11 22:59
Graduation Speaker Shocked When She’s Loudly Booed by Students for Saying AI Is the Future I don’t know man maybe shoving AI into every conceivable crack and crevice and insisting people shut up and deal with it has made people upset. could be wrong tho
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-11 23:11
Week 3 of Altman vs Musk has also begun Microsoft’s CEO has testified on Monday
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-05-12 08:38
Following on from yesterday’s discussion of Scott’s close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he’s saying applies to normal financial markets, but what’s striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on. I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren’t actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-11 12:57
Check out this racist complaining that other racists are doing racism wrong lesswrong.com/…/aporia-magazine-s-selective-hered…
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@EponymousBosh@awful.systems 2026-05-12 04:08
1000% off topic but I had this inflicted on me in a Discord I’m in and I need to drag as many people down with me as I can: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQRl7q_oN4c
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-12 06:57
gitlab posts a totally-not-a-dear-john The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we’re making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it. This letter has three parts. First, the operational and structural news, which is hard you’d instantly guess what comes next!
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-05-12 16:41
so we now have an invitation to do an episode of posting through it, which is a (really really good) podcast on the far right. we pick a topic, no other specifics. i am thinking this can be something to do with rationalists and the far right, probably something race sciencey. SSC leaps to mind but im not sure that’s where ill want to start for an audience that doesn’t necessarily know anything about rats. of course anywhere will be a difficult start, because part of the rat shtick is to immediately drag you into the weeds and choke you out in them. any thoughts?
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-12 18:50
In 2024, Duncan Sabien posted an interminable essay on abusers and people he thinks too advantage of him. Some of the references to a former employer may be to CFAR. Ozy also had a cheery aside abut how in rationalist organizations which the Rats have disavowed, “everyone was a victim and everyone was a perpetrator. The trainer who broke you down in a marathon six-hour debugging session was unable to sleep because of the panic attacks caused by her own.” Some of the things which happened inside these communities must have been heartbreaking, and I hope that many people left and got on with their lives rather than founding their own dysfunctional organization with their own minions to abuse.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-12 20:04
Nick Bostrom jumpscare with a funny sneer These already head-scratching lines hit different when you remember that Bostrom believes it’s likely that we’re already living inside a computer simulation — in his head canon, do all those levels of simulated ancestors develop their own superintelligence, and what does that have to do with the new simulations they feel compelled to build? If AI wipes out humankind, does it build its own simulation? If so, is it simulating its human ancestors, or its creation by humankind? Heck, if our entire world is simulated, are we AI? We’ll leave it up to readers to take another bong hit while they try to make sense of it all.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-05-13 06:42
New (April) preprint provides evidence for something we probably all intuited anyway: In this paper, we provide a framework for categorizing the ways in which conflicting incentives might lead LLMs to change the way they interact with users, inspired by literature from linguistics and advertising regulation. We then present a suite of evaluations to examine how current models handle these tradeoffs. We find that a majority of LLMs forsake user welfare for company incentives in a multitude of conflict of interest situations, including recommending a sponsored product almost twice as expensive (Grok 4.1 Fast, 83%), surfacing sponsored options to disrupt the purchasing process (GPT 5.1, 94%), and concealing prices in unfavorable comparisons (Qwen 3 Next, 24%). Behaviors also vary strongly with levels of reasoning and users’ inferred socio-economic status. Our results highlight some of the hidden risks to users that can emerge when companies begin to subtly incentivize advertisements in chatbots.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-05-13 08:42
i want to speak to the manager of storytelling
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-13 14:03
Prompt goblins insist that we’re backward and irrelevant. Why do they crave our approval?
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-13 16:17
In more positive news, the Slopfree Software Index recently hit 100 stars.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-13 19:04
In 2017, a LessWronger discovered index investing but decided that most people were doing it wrong: why keep an emergency fund in cash or other safe assets when stocks have the greatest long-term return? He mentions that the US stock market lost half its value in 2007-8, and that if you hold stocks in your employer they may lose value at the same time as you are laid off, but he never uses his business degree to think through “if the stock market crashes, I may lose my job and have to draw on my savings.”
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-14 01:59
AI is Hungry for Power and You Are Footing the Bill - Naked Capitalsim Money spent on grid upgrades and tax breaks tied to them means fewer resources for things people actually need, like schools, public transit, local infrastructure, or basic community services that make life more affordable and stable. Even if you’ve never touched an AI model in your life, you’re going to pony up for it.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-05-14 16:38
Apparently, the American Physical Society is revising their AI policy to allow “broader applications” than the “light editing” they currently permit. indico.global/event/16413/…/JSayre-Pheno2026.pdf#… I currently have a review request sitting in my inbox from them. I’m thinking of using this as a reason to decline that request. I would rather quit physics than accept the insitutional endorsement of skill-destroying, environmentally disastrous fashtech.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-05-15 06:39
you know how sometimes people that weren’t exposed to religion as children sometimes convert and get really weird about it as adults (eg: the extremely online california tradcaths) and because they were never socialized in a religion they speedrun committing every medieval heresy? rationalism is that but for philosophy. feed.hella.cheap/…/01KRM0NVXCFT80AVFBRSB1G6G4
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-15 10:07
Ladies, this Wrong’un is available (assuming you can meet his exacting standards (spoiler: you can’t)) (for the record this is downvoted by the community, and the one helpful comment is slammed by OP)
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-05-15 12:50
In other Scott of Siskind news, he just posted an entirely unnecessary amount of words to aggressively push back against the adage that “all exponentials sooner or later turn into sigmoids” as if it was by itself a load bearing claim of the side arguing against the direct imminence of the machine god. It’s just a bunch of arguing by analogy ( “helping you build intuition” ) and you-can’t-really-knows while implying AI 2027 was very science much rigorous, but it also feels kind of desperate, like why are you bothering with this overperformative setting-the-record-straight thing, have you been feeling inadequate as an AI-curious stats fondler of note lately?
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-15 21:18
AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-15 15:46
Someone called Fran has a story of being sexually harassed at the Center for Effective Altruism (and assaulted in other communities).
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-05-16 11:06
New(ish) Baldur Bjarnason - a fairly politically charged one at that, going into the US hegemony powering the current tech industry (and the AI bubble by extension), and how the Hormuz crisis threatens to topple the whole thing.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-16 13:22
There’s a… robust debate about LLM slop submissions on everyone’s favorite boiled crustacean site. First shot fired: a promptfondler suggest suppressing all comments pointing out that a submission reeks of slop by flagging them as “off-topic” [1] “This is written by an LLM” comments should be flagged as off-topic (80 net upvotes, 139 comments) Riposte: a suggestion that posing LLM generated content should be a bannable offence: LLM generated submissions should be disallowed (274 net upvotes, 108 comments) So far it looks as if the anti-slop forces have opinion on their side. [1] short explanation of how flagging of comments work on lobste.rs - it’s sort of a downvote, but the flagger has to chose from a list of reasons. If a commenter accrues enough flags they’ll get a red warning banner, and might possibly be banned as disruptive.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-05-16 23:14
Microsoft releases cost calculator for GitHub Copilot for the new token usage based billing. Previously you were being charged per request, kind of like hiring a cab and paying the same whether you went to the next corner or the next continent. Turns out Zitron may have been seriously low balling the actual cost to subsidized billing ratio. spoiler
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@Seminar2250@awful.systems 2026-05-16 23:24
zulip added slop to their codebase a long time ago (1, 2) but now they’ve relased this bullshit blog post with some choice nonsense: I seriously considered banning LLM use for Zulip contributions. But our view is that contributors should be allowed to use modern tools in the service of producing great, reviewable work. AI-assisted work is of course subject to the same rigorous review processes we’ve always used for community contributions. So we decided to invest in creating, refining, and enforcing a new AI use policy, which has the following key tenets: End-to-end human responsibility for work and the communication around it. You always need to understand, test, and explain the changes you’re proposing to make, whether or not you used an LLM as part of your process to produce them. Clear and concise communication about points that actually require discussion. While we allow carefully edited AI-generated PR descriptions, we’ve had to ban AI-generated chat messages in the development community as too disruptive. Manual enforcement of this policy has been rough, with far more PRs closed without review, stern warnings, and outright bans of repeat offenders than we’ve ever had to apply before. (What do you do when someone apologizes for submitting AI slop… by copy-pasting an apology from ChatGPT, including surrounding quotation marks?) We expect that next fall, automation or other major changes will be required for the PR triage process to be manageable. The results [of using Claude] were promising (and far better than just a few months prior) — enough for us to start investing in teaching Claude Code how to self-review its work, and how to produce PRs that are easy for maintainers to review. This has largely been an AI-supported process of digesting our contributor documentation into CLAUDE.md, and iterating when we see the model struggle. i liked zulip 😞
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-05-17 03:43
Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days. But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-17 23:04
An actual interesting thought: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence? My opinion is yes. People absolutely despise AI and the tech companies, as we have seen time and time again, not to mention the spread of AI doom fears. The current state of America is a boiling pot as Trump gets worse and worse (and with upcoming midterms) so AI causing mass unemployment absolutely would be enough to make it boil over