Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026
2026-05-24 23:00 UTC
Replies (40)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-25 05:07
Behold, one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender (according to Yud)
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-05-25 06:13
At this point I’m starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it! businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-google-graduati… Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. […] “These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,” he added, referring to AI.
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-05-25 10:31
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you’re an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, “oh but they’re useful for some things, like making summaries”. four years and billions of dollars and devastation to “improve” them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that “AI summaries” are going well:
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@zogwarg@awful.systems 2026-05-25 11:53
Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature) vatican.va/…/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Ar… EDIT, snippets: We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […] [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]
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@fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 2026-05-25 13:33
In the latest episode of “behold the power of Mythos” from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software I distilled it so you don’t have to. Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects. That 10,000 count didn’t even survive until paragraph 3. Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives. Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring! 23,019 potential vulnerability candidates Ok now we’re talking. 1,900 Reviewed by external security firms Wait, what? Why those? Why only those? 1726 confirmed positive You couldn’t even cherry pick the valid ones? 467 reported to maintainers Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better… 1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives) 1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic’s media release has the goods! 1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves Slightly higher than the 1726, and I’m guessing the internal reviews were from scanning Claude’s code, but ok, whatever. Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity 10% of 10000 is still something, right? On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity. I’m sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% accuracy rate based on Mythos’ own estimations. But wasn’t that 1129 the bulk of your reports? We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible. 530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers… 65 of those have been given public advisories The infographic says 88. I’d ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are. 23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you’d probably hit the same level of accuracy.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-25 05:56
In a surprising turn and with much hedging, George Hotz suggests that maybe LLMs are bad actually. hackernews says that he’s holding it wrong. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263238
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-25 19:05
Mike Masnick had a look at Twitter’s financials in the SpaceX IPO. From $5 billion in ad and licensing revenue in 2021, twitter + Grok is down to $3 billion revenue a year (and losing $6 billion just on the CSAM-generating chatbot). His billionaire friends tossed in $2 billion or $250 million each into the kitty after a brief chat back in 2022.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-05-25 20:53
I’ve not seen this shared here yet so I thought I’d share: Is AI Profitable Yet? isaiprofitable.com
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-25 22:54
Masnick also has a story on how Musk got away with hiding just how many Twitter shares he owned when he bought the company techdirt.com/…/elon-musk-settles-sec-lawsuit-for-…
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-05-26 00:59
I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Bronson just let me watch the fucking game
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-05-26 01:16
Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: web.archive.org/…/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-s…
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-26 05:51
I’m surprised the religious fanatics (protestant) haven’t turned on AI yet. The ones around these parts think that UFOs and pokemon cards are satanic, so the Californian lying machice hat tells kids to kill themselves wouldn’t be much of a reach.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-26 06:56
Aella asks what type of sexist she is based off some poll results
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-26 08:06
This was from last year but I forgot about, but this article allegedly about a survey conducted by MIRI and Stanford University on a bunch of AI experts about timelines, which is 99% likely to be entirely AI generated since said survey straight up doesn’t exist (I didn’t find anything like it when I did some searches) the website title being “ai blogs ai” kinda gives it away
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-26 09:38
Here’s a LWer suggesting the key to life extension is to grow unconscious clones of yourself and when your current body becomes too old, just pop your brain into the clone lesswrong.com/…/brain-transfers-might-be-the-easi… please enjoy picking apart this idea, b/c so far the LW commentariat aren’t interested
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-05-26 10:41
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on. Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people. “There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s
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@NextElephant9@awful.systems 2026-05-26 11:27
I thought this interview with Prof. Michael I. Jordan was worth listening to, he’s bringing down the hype a bit: Intelligence is collective, not artificial — Prof. Michael I. Jordan (UC Berkeley / Inria).
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@Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 2026-05-26 11:30
I don’t even know what to say here. Cool scam I guess xcancel.com/herasight/status/2057888072092856823
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-05-26 14:54
new odium symposium episode (at the link and on all platforms). we talk to professor of africana studies danielle procope bell about her recent paper “‘Pick-Me’ Black women: tactical patriarchal femininity in the Black manosphere.” https://www.patreon.com/posts/17-introduction-159058420
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-05-26 15:07
lbpost.com/…/california-state-university-renews-c… A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June. Are we so locked in we’re going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn’t be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-26 21:15
Michael Burry is one of the investors who is shorting big tech. (Business Insider - paywalled Substack). I just invest much less in the USA than its 60% share of the global stock market, and less than 40% of that in big tech.
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-27 06:49
fuckin casey is at it again haven’t got time to sneer it just yet, but had to share
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-05-27 08:35
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment. I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-05-27 15:01
Via, looks like wikipedia is going anti union.
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-05-28 01:30
A Google employee was charged with commodities fraud for using insider information to win a Polymarket bet about who the most searched for person in 2025 would be (complaint, article). So far the internet seems confused whether or not this all counts as commodities fraud at all or not and if so, how (this area of law is way too confusing which is one of the reasons I of course never use insider information to bet on polymarket).
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-05-28 03:15
Project Cybersyn but worse yahoo.com/…/argentina-launched-ai-predict-future-…
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-05-28 04:33
At minute 8 of “SpaceX IPO: Nice Try Though” Patrick Boyle mentions some circular finance: some of the banks which lent SpaceX $29 billion in March will be guaranteeing the IPO by promising to buy some shares to stabilize the price. Later he also points out that the banks financing the IPO have to buy Grok services and may be its main paying customers. Musk has done this sort of thing before eg. using Tesla (shareholder-owned) money to buy SolarCity which he partially owned. I knew a serial fraudster who moved to Texas for its business-friendly laws and courts. It took Kaiser Bill to break the economic power of London and Paris, but the Muskrat thinks he can speedrun that game for the New York City map.
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-05-28 06:06
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago! www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-28 07:55
new Scott Aaronson blog post just dropped, about those solved Erdos problems, AI short stories and the Pope’s anti-AI stance. Ending with this paragraph: And so, at this momentous era for the human project, and no less of an authority than that of the Vicar of Christ himself, the Supreme Pontiff and the Successor of Peter, I hereby throw myself on the wisdom and mercy of … uhh, Chris Olah and his team at Anthropic.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-28 08:21
CW: creepy dudes A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works: lesswrong.com/…/why-physical-attractiveness-matte… It made the frontpage. Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research: lesswrong.com/…/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attr… Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc. These are just very weird people.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-05-28 08:45
jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad From github thread: I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo. Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: blog.johanneslink.net/…/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/ Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-28 13:51
hey awful, a Question: do any of y’all know if there’s a decent writeup of the rationalist/hanson/thiel pre-history of prediction markets (a la polymarket etc) before they hit the much-heightened popularity of the last ~18mo?
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-28 14:13
It’s a day ending in Y and LW has terrible takes on SF Vinge is a sort of a patron saint of the California Ideology, even though he’s such a good writer it doesn’t really shine through that bad. George Seidoh Worley tries to shoehorn his classic 90s novels into LLM-land lesswrong.com/…/llms-through-the-eyes-of-vinge#32… Spoilers ahead! For some reason the books are in a weird order in his review. Here’s publication history A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), has Pham Nuwen as a (revived clone) character A Deepness in the Sky (1999), has Pham Nuwen alive and involved in the Qeng Ho. It’s set 20,000 years before. The Children of the Sky (2012) - I haven’t read this because I hate the fucking Tines and don’t want to read more about them and their planet. Direct sequel to Fire. Whorley tackles Deepness first. A Deepness in the Sky is largely about Focus, a technology for turning humans into LLMs. Only, that’s not how it’s presented in the book. In the book, Focus is a medical condition that results when a person suffers a managed infection of the “mindrot” virus. If they survive, they become Focused, which gives them the ability to work free from all distractions, but at the cost of most of what makes them human. Although we see Focus used as a weapon to control people in the book, the normal way a person becomes Focused is through school. A person goes through higher education, becomes an expert in something, and is then Focused so they can fully exploit their expertise. Of course, the Focused are also exploited and often treated like slaves, and the Focusing process can’t always be reversed, so even in the ideal case it’s not a harmless technology. OK so Deepness is about the libertarian trader society Qeng Ho who discover and try to make contact with the Spiders, and are then sneakily attacked by the totalitarian Emergents who use the mindrot virus to enslave them. Quoting Wikipedia Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning people into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew not in suspended animation. Throughout the book, the effects and costs of Focus are clearly detrimental (even if Focus helps humans communicate with the Spiders). The Emergents are your classic libertarian boogeymen. Turning people into LLMs is not something Vinge sees as a good thing. Next we jump to Children. Tines World is in the Slow Zone, so AGI doesn’t work there. The titular Children are refugees from the Beyond, where it does. In one scene, they are surprised to learn that they can’t just vibe their way towards developing a medical cure for one character’s disease. They fail to understand just how difficult it is to run an experiment, since they expect the automation to do it all for them. They end up forming a political rebellion mostly over the fact that they can’t get the computer to do what they want, and they’re desperate to prioritize getting access to AGI again, no matter the risks. Writing from 2026, I can understand the Children. I use AI to help me think all the time. I use it to do my job. My life is better with it, and I don’t want to go back. I can feel myself losing the ability to do things on my own. I could go back if I had to, but I wouldn’t want to, and I hope I don’t have to. If I had grown up only knowing how to do things with the help of AI, it’d be a major threat to my sense of personhood to lose access to it, and I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk. (my emphasis) Next, we come to Fire The Blight is the primary antagonist of A Fire Upon the Deep, a dangerous ASI that seeks power with no moral regard for what it considers lesser life. It’s the reason Ravna and the Children ended up on Tines World in the Slow Zone, and also responsible for the death of trillions of lives. “Responsible” is subverting this a bit. Sure, the Blight takes over civilizations and turns the inhabitants into “soul dead” meat puppets, and it does destroy others, but the central twist of Fire (and the reason the Children are stuck in the Slow) is that reincarnated Pham Nuwen, using weird alien tech, deliberately expands the Slow into the volumes taken over by the Blight, thereby dooming uncounted civilizations and trillions of beings to die once the technology they rely on stops working. Worley: In Vinge’s universe, the Blight is stopped thanks to help from superintelligences out in the Transcend that care about the lives of people down in the Beyond. In our world, if we create a Blight, we have little reason to think we will be so lucky. (my emphasis) nah mang they wanted to stop the Blight, and gave no shits about lesser intelligences hanging around in the Beyond. But note that Worley states that he’s put the entire galaxy at risk to keep access to AI, but the Blight, an AI and presumably driven by the same general goals, is the bad guy? Anyway, read Vinge if you haven’t already. He’s a good writer, unlike the LW hacks misreading him.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-29 04:46
So I was poking around the AI 2027 blog and discovered that they apparently may working on making another scenario, this time titled “AI 2030” they haven’t made any posts about it (that I can find anyways) but if its just an AI 2027 rewrite but with moved back timelines I’d imagine people will be less charitable with them
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-05-29 07:03
good morning that fuckin company had another funding round the further one reads, the more depressing it gets Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners—Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix cool so it’s going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-05-29 07:11
It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-05-29 08:00
A bit more on the Anthropic cofounder who was there at the Pope’s speech choice snippet: Olah even went as far as to say that Anthropic is operating “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” painting his employer as exactly the kind of entity that’s attempting to assume “monopolistic control” over tech, as Pope Leo warned in his encyclical. why on earth you would say this when your company’s whole thing is being safe and smarter than the competition is beyond me
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-05-29 18:23
If you want to witness a bunch of emotionally stunted clanker fondlers totally missing the point, check out the comments on this orange site thread.
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@sinedpick@awful.systems 2026-05-29 22:45
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she’s the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. justine.lol/animus/
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-05-31 07:44
A detailed look at what kind of slop code is being added to rsync and how exactly slop codes does, allegedly, “tests”. Somehow it’s just what I expected and worse than I thought. neuromatch.social/@jonny/116667218484408879