Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th May 2026
2026-05-17 23:11 UTC
Replies (39)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-18 00:38
Might as well port this over here since I posted it late in the old thread 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 and cause violence
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-18 02:20
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-18 02:21
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-18 03:26
Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 “when massive private companies go public.”
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-05-18 05:43
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923 It is an impressively bad speech.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-18 13:39
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man: lesswrong.com/…/why-physical-attractiveness-matte… A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. gee I wonder why The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys. hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you 1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-18 13:14
Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space. It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-05-18 15:31
Hey, remember Pascal’s wager? What if we got the leader of the church to be part of our new “ai ethics” product launch bloomberg.com/…/anthropic-s-co-founder-to-launch-…
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-18 19:03
Ms. A reported extensive experience working with active appearance models (AAMs) and large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots—in school and as a practicing medical professional, with a firm understanding of how such technologies work. Following a “36-hour sleep deficit” while on call, she first started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for a variety of tasks that varied from mundane tasks to attempting to find out if her brother, a software engineer who died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself that she was “supposed to find” so that she could “talk to him again.” from here. what follows just gets more screech-inducing
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-18 19:09
Elon Musk has lost his court case against OpenAI
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-18 21:58
Iran has created an Insurance Company to guarantee safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels pay their Insurance Premiums in Bitcoin x.com/IranObserver0/status/2055716544596922700 via naked capitalism this is fine
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-18 23:13
AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology “Why do people hate us so much for constantly saying the technology we’re making is dangerous and then blocking regulation, sucking up resources, committing mass theft and plagiarism, threatening to destabilise the economy, enabling more CSAM, unleashing a barrage of slop, enabling mass surveillance and mocking people against the tech? Don’t they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?”
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-19 21:17
Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team? news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189073
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-19 23:26
Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-20 08:16
presented without context, because it’s funnier that way: www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/leogao-s-shortform?comm…
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-05-20 08:32
Google released their new Gemini 3.5 “flash” model at I/O yesterday. For those who aren’t familiar, the “flash” model is typically marketed as the lower end and the “pro” model is the higher end for each given model generation. The interesting thing here is that the new “flash” model is almost as expensive as the “pro” from the previous generation. As my favourite “neutral-but-not-really” AI booster Simon Willison says: This fits a trend: OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 was 2x the price of GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus 4.7 is around 1.46x the price of 4.6 when you take the new tokenizer into account. It feels like all three of the major AI labs are starting to probe the price tolerance of their API customers. Speed running enshittification - a process that typically only works when people are reliant on your product and have no other option than to pay the inflated price
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-20 08:53
Rationalists: we should always incorporate new data into our worldview Also rationalists: I found some anthropology study of Australian First nations from 1899 and found it fascinating www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/shortplav?commentId=zn2… Of course they measured skulls.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-20 16:32
Edward W. Niedermeyer calls the plans to put SpaceX and OpenAI public at ludicrously inflated valuations and dump shares on index funds for real money BAGNAROK. American pension funds are starting to say out loud that this is a bad deal. The officials - representing three of the top four largest public pension plans in the U.S. - objected to the amount of power the board has given Musk over the company, including voting control over the stock, veto power over his own removal as CEO, and protections from litigation, including mandatory arbitration for SpaceX shareholder claims. … In their letter, the pension leaders urged SpaceX to adopt one-share, one-vote or sunset super-voting shares within seven years; install a majority-independent board and separate the CEO and chair roles; eliminate provisions protecting Musk from termination without his approval; scrap mandatory arbitration; and require independent approval of related-party transactions with Musk’s other companies. “Precisely because SpaceX is poised to occupy a position of systemic importance in the public markets, and to become, through index inclusion, an unavoidable holding in our portfolios, its governance must at least adhere to the baseline protections upon which long-term institutional capital depends, rather than seeking to diminish them,” they wrote.
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-20 18:06
“You should assume that you’re being manipulated until they have better systems in place,” says Lily Ray, founder of the search engine optimisation (SEO) and AI search consultancy Algorythmic. "We’re moving towards this ‘one true answer’ world. from here on the one hand I’m all “save me from marketroids”, on the other all “oh so we’ve solved philosophy?” dear god what a fucking sentence to be saying as a description of the moment. and I’d fucking bet they’re talking to their customers in the same terms/language
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-05-20 19:14
GitHub got pwnd by a compromised VS Code extension. Internal repos were exfiltrated. Disclosure on Twitter
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-20 23:00
SpaceX (+ Grok + twitter) submitted a request for an IPO to the SEC: www.sec.gov/…/0001628280-26-036936-index.htm
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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-05-21 09:41
new tante tante.cc/…/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-21 13:34
HN, lobste.rs and LW are jizzing themselves over the newspress release that ChatGPT[1] has disproven an Erdos[2] conjecture. no-one pauses to think this is a transparent attempt to goose interest in OpenAI before they commit an IPO [1] I know it’s not literally ChatGPT, it’s an “internal model” [2] fuck trying to find the double acute accent or w/e it’s called over the o
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-21 18:23
spending way too much on GPUs is the spending way to much on mining rigs at least dude didn’t burn his house down
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-21 18:45
A LWer of the female persuasion makes the entirely reasonable point that most screw-top openings are probably constructed by looking at median male grip strength, not female. But the real fun is in the comments, where people who can post comments on a blog are seemingly unfamiliar with opening jam jars. Women should be able to open things
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-05-21 19:16
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-05-21 22:16
OpenAI Announces Construction Of New Data Center On Top Of Sick Child
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-21 21:26
A Substack in the name of Cape Fear Advisors LLC argued that SpaceX wants to get in people’s retirement accounts then say to Uncle Sam “you had better give us lots of contracts or we will crash and take grandma’s retirement funds with us.” Sucking on the government teat has been one of Elon Musk’s favourite strategies since he got access to a State of California green transport grant. I do not know if that can work because only a few percent of the company will be for sale so they will only be a fraction of a percent of those index funds. They can definitely sell some shares for real dollars, and if they keep the price high they can borrow real dollars against the shares which are not on the market like people borrow against bitcoin. I will not link because it is in that articulate but empty style that does well on Substack. It may be written by or with help from AI.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-22 05:08
The myth that talking about bubbles prevents bubbles for when someone starts saying some “oh but everyone says AI is a bubble which must mean its not”
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@veganes_hack@awful.systems 2026-05-22 08:12
the new flipper one will have a “local llm” slopbot, because of course it fucking will. also suspect they’ve used an llm for the blog post because of the emoji list. and the illustrations are also giving me weird vibes. blog.flipper.net/flipper-one-we-need-your-help
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@FRACTRANS@awful.systems 2026-05-22 20:48
xcancel.com/HeyEpic/status/2057588783420244264 🫨
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-22 22:52
Can’t find the exact post rn but I remember an AI yt channel (im 90% sure it was the AISpecies guy) using this as proof that ASI is imminent, and conveniently left out the part at the end where they say this does not indicate that AI is now a general-purpose alignment scientist (and also left out the link to the sources in numerous posts iirc so no one could fact check him easily)
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-23 01:26
Holy Empire of AI - Predictive History Once you have the AI state, you now have the technocracy and the world will be perfect. All right? Does it make sense you guys? What he’s saying here? This is an amazing paragraph written 40, 50 years ago. So, I’m not saying he’s a Freemason. I’m not saying he’s part of a society, but, he sure thinks like a Freemason. Zbigniew Brzezinski has been dead for nearly a decade, but sure, let’s play the hits. plus AI! /s Jiang hadn’t popped up in my feed in a while, guess he’s still at it. At least he’s reading Karen Hao, maybe some viewers follow his cites. He really should just write a Dan Brown novel or something, he’s obviously capable enough at lore dumping.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-05-23 05:02
anyone know of activities you can do to improve your mic skills? looked around a bit for open mics in my area, not a lot going on
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-05-23 12:58
Feeling robbed of my path to citizenship right now after grinding a PhD and contributing to foundational AI + computing technologies for the United States for the past ~ 10 years. Feels like robbing top and technologists like me of the opportunity to achieve the American Dream oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest violin
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-05-23 18:19
SpaceX has chosen a sacrificial disposable naive crypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lea… The mission is expected to take two years and here’s what he has to say about that: I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff through landing, so I think I’m going to enjoy the trip.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-24 15:48
Spring is in the air, and someone presenting themselves as interested in fucking rationalist males has authored a piece about how said men can dress a bit better and maybe, just maybe, get laid: lesswrong.com/…/basic-principles-for-dressing-bet… as usual, the real comedy is in the comments I dress like a schlub specifically to avoid advertising my sexual availability - lesswrong.com/…/basic-principles-for-dressing-bet… “The item that I currently wear that expresses the most about me is my Oura ring followed by barefoot shoes.” - strangely not the same as the commenter above "When it comes to slim fit jeans I have the impression that fashion changed. Five years ago they were seen as great and now they don’t? Is that accurate?“ “Overall, I think it makes the most sense to go to the pareto frontier here. You can spend 300-400 total getting some nice looking earth tone button-ups, well-fitting pants that aren’t blue jeans, trim your beard, get regular haircuts from an actual salon, shower daily, and make sure you smell decent.” ”[…] when I look at the examples, what occurs to me is that dressing like the example would cause me to stick out and make it obvious to others I am making a special effort, and I’d rather not do that." “I was hoping for more fashion theory; the why. “ “It is fascinating to receive such communiqués of strange news from another star. I would not know, without your saying so, that the set of 10 pictures are intended to be good examples and not bad examples.” ”[…] it is far more important that whatever my spouse wears be a pleasant texture to put my face on, most buttondown material fails this criterion but linen passes” - actually this is just cute
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-05-24 18:58
STOP FINDING THINGS WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA “RANDOM PAGE” “Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS FIRST” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them (This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines) “None of Africa’s 54 recognized countries start with the letter ‘K’.” “Add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce” “Understood. No more templates—just direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need.” “Hello Something went wrong and an AI response wasn’t generated” They have played us for absolute fools
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@sansruse@awful.systems 2026-05-25 04:22
in which our dearest friend DHH has become an unpaid shill for the novel Camp of the Saints xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046982319353778391 nevertheless, the finest minds at hackernews and elsewhere have assured me that he’s just a normal, sensible center right kind of guy! nothing untoward going on here, i advise every boutique computer manufacturer known to man to financially support him and his hyprland reskin wankfest.