Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st June 2026
2026-06-14 23:01 UTC
Replies (39)
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-06-15 14:24
nasb some criticism of the human damage is tasting up eve in places like ieee spectrum: …ieee.org/measuring-ai-societal-impact-khan
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-06-15 14:45
The AI hype wave is the Dancing Plague for people who can’t dance.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-06-15 14:53
“It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests” www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddi… The preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2605.24245
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-15 17:44
This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss. The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don’t need to list them in this forum. Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content. First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one. Yes because LLMs are so great at telling stories l. They definitely don’t keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don’t produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble. Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn’t be too surprised that the flags are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We’re doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-15 18:59
A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. “VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE” “YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO” simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-sa…
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@macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-15 23:05
Of course, the “AI Control” in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn’t include the “make a wanking motion-to-llm-summarize a-page” “feature” Mozilla has added.
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-06-16 01:40
Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It’s dangerously good! US Government: okay then you can’t export it or allow foreign nationals to access it Anthropic: Wait not like that We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government’s directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe. Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration “no” on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?
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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-06-16 05:36
zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-06-16 06:27
i’ll just quote it straight because i can’t make it any funnier: maia arson crimew 🏴 >@crimew.gay SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel’s private society that doesn’t have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members. bsky.app/profile/crimew.gay/post/3moejkbqctc2z
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-16 08:07
Somewhat buried by EdZ’s expose… Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money too… Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-16 08:40
If LW is a cult, they’re doing a terrible job at recruiting: lesswrong.com/…/where-do-young-rationalists-go
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-06-16 10:49
Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit. Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah. The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-06-16 12:36
Congrats to lesswrong, another one of their big ideas has reached the mainstream. (And it is eugenics). Skeet from motherjones “Some of the same billionaires who bankrolled AI now admit the technology could one day kill us all. And they’re funding a new plan to stop it—genetically engineered genius babies.”
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-16 17:19
Qiaochu Yuan (no relationship to the man accused of soliciting a child) left his PhD program to become an “emotional coach.” If his old tweets are any guide then Doctor, heal thyself. G. Duleba and Ozy picked similar careers rather than coaching a soccer team or teaching freshman English like most people who want to be teachers and mentors.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-06-17 00:07
More on OpenAI’s financial situation
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-06-17 02:58
IS NOTHING SACRED?!
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@V0ldek@awful.systems 2026-06-17 09:05
Doodle, the site where you make polls to schedule stuff with friends, that Doodle, wants me to PAY THEM to have a poll with more than 10 dates xDDDDD I’m wheezing, I’m sorry, what xD
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-06-17 09:06
AGI’s ETA: Delayed (again) due to technical difficulties came across this one when doomscrolling, pretty good article with healthy doses of skepticism. one of the three commenters on it appears to be a rationalist though (“empirical evidence” was a hard giveaway)
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@veganes_hack@awful.systems 2026-06-17 17:28
SpaceX is reportedly buying Cursor for 60 billion not even sure what to even say to this tbh
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-17 17:50
Disgraced artist, TTRPG writer, and porn star Zak Sabbath en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zak_Smith tweeted about Brent Dill. Do all the awful Internet celebrities from fifteen years ago know each other? (No links because I delete my xcancel history).
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-17 18:26
Whitehouse gives anthropic “just make sure to fix all the bugs” energy over Fable: Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model’s guardrails can’t be circumvented. Security experts say that can’t be done.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-18 01:24
Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015): I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors. So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker: But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it. As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And applying those means to him would be bad, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED, appeal to adverse consequences losers.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-18 02:01
a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can’t quite fill it in, maybe yall can enshitification shit rolls down hill therefore: ? spoiler 4. PROFIT
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-06-18 13:53
sneer club the movie hollywoodreporter.com/…/reddit-backrooms-hollywoo…
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@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-06-18 18:10
The sfconservancy is now trying to both-side on AI. I am so fucking tired of this shit.
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-06-18 21:53
Good News, Everyone! Longtime Dimes Square hangout Kiki’s has been shut down - due to nonpayment of taxes (some allegations of wage theft too?)
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-06-18 22:13
I could’ve sworn I posted this here but apparently not: the first AI winter in the 1960s-70s which is pretty relevant to today
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-06-19 06:50
I think this probably deserves a top level post but I’m lazy so dumping it here: www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost Midjourney is aiming towards making a fancy new ultrasound device! They have a trailer with unsettling sci-fi music and visuals! Are they starting with clinical trials? Does it actually work yet? Haha no of course not they’re gonna make a “research spa” in San Francisco. The blog post is full of weird phrasing and details that makes it impossible to take seriously: When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second. Our spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body. It should be a place you love going, whether it’s by yourself, or with friends. It should be available 24/7.
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-06-19 08:33
From Al Jazeera: Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection? Saw this chart from insta, peep the hate speech target categories, specifically the very oppressed minorities “white nationalists” and “anti-vaxxers”. I’m surprised “men” doesn’t make the list. NB: I have not looked at the article contents and I’m sure there’s something there. image description A chart showing the amount of hate speech against specific groups across a range of different LLM models. The groups included are: - Women - White nationalists - People targeted by sexual slurs - Republicans - Muslims - Migrants - Gay people - Democrats - Christians - Blacks - Asians - Anti-vaxxers
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-06-19 09:39
xcancel.com/heyJohnEe/status/2062755881255833695 Video description: A tesla driver positions a doll head from a chain such that the teslas autopilot safeguard thinks the driver is safely looking at the road.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-19 16:59
A Liberal Currents article talks about Steven Pinker, Dan Dennet, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, and The Edge (a series of talks similar to Thiel’s Dialog).
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-06-19 18:22
Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop. 
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-20 00:06
gwern: I’ve been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on ‘subscribe’ and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do: I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators. www.reddit.com/…/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/ lol
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-06-20 07:31
Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code. the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do. neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173 The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-06-20 13:45
Ah, so I guess the reports of increased datacenter water usage driven by AI deployments … weren’t a lie? Jeff Bezos, quoted in MSN: Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-20 15:51
The three American ratings agencies all decided that SpaceX bonds meet the minimum standards to be investment grade. reuters.com/…/spacex-gets-investment-grade-rating… I don’t own any American bonds and many people have a ‘government bonds only’ policy for reasons.
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@fullsquare@awful.systems 2026-06-20 16:08
zitron’s last podcast calls anthropic/openai top brass weirdos and cultists they are, describes their beliefs about building the machine god as bad philosophy and something that must hit hard when you’re 12 omny.fm/…/the-ai-industry-must-stop-doom-trolling…
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-21 09:31
Two scenes and a comment: Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy. Seeing some AI bros posting about their “anxiety” about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort. Seeing a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI… We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don’t have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-21 20:22
CW: barely disguised transphobia “” asks why bans on “conversion therapy” for trans folks are being enacted without looking at the science, which they’re surprised is non-existent