Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th July 2026
2026-07-05 23:01 UTC
Replies (22)
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-06 07:13
A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come a rss them already: Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all. Meta’s Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there. In retrospect, he said, the “trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn’t really accelerated in the way that we expected,” and that the company’s bets on the new structure “haven’t come to fruition yet.” Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can execute tasks on behalf of a user. Conversations he was having “with our top people” when they started planning the restructuring in January and February “were that they were worried that we weren’t going to move fast enough to adapt,” Zuckerberg said. I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-07-06 17:45
Via (she also predicted it): Bryan Johnson gave himself a incurable disease. Welcome to the age of Oceangatelikes.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-06 18:33
More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware. Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments. Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-06 21:39
AI has hacked the code of human civilization | Yuval Noah Harari at Oxford. via naked capitalism. hrmmm. Harari was always a recommended book on rationalist-adjacent sites like ribbonfarm and farnam street back in the day. He too has an ai talk. The important thing to note about bureaucratic systems is that they are extremely artificial environments where a relatively narrow intelligence is sufficient to exert an enormous impact. A lawyer, banker, or government official who cannot hold an axe or hammer can nevertheless cut down entire forests and build entire cities simply by moving documents within a bureaucratic network. If you take that lawyer out of the system and throw them into the messy, unstructured jungle, their legal skills mean nothing, and they would be no match for a chimpanzee, lion, or elephant. However, we have already imposed our bureaucratic systems on the jungle. Consequently, if you were to pit all the lions in the world against one very good lawyer, the lawyer would prevail. Today, the survival of species like lions depends on the lawyers, accountants, and bankers moving documents through the bureaucratic labyrinths of governments and corporations. This is the environment in which AI is gaining agency. While an AI thrown into the jungle could not start mining iron to build a robot army, it is poised to wield enormous power within the bureaucratic systems humans have created, as AIs are native bureaucrats. No human lawyer can remember every law and regulation in the UK, no accountant can track all transactions of a bank, and no bishop can memorize all of Canon law and 2,000 years of theological texts. An AI can do all of these things. So half-right that it’s almost impressive. But I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-07-07 06:11
The future is so strange (I got this in my youtube suggestions) like, try explaining this to someone from 20 years ago and they’d look at you like you were off your rocker
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-07-07 21:42
What will EA (and, more specifically, Lighthaven) do with all the money they expect to receive once the Anthropic IPO mints a bunch of hundred-millionaires? I’m not granting all of the article’s premises, but the interviews with rationalists might be of interest.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-07 21:52
so its Bad bad now Unfortunately for everybody, it’s managed to outperform even the most cynical doomsday forecasts, to the degree that the US economy is now in even worse shape than it was right before an infamous downturn in the late 1920s. That’s according to the Telegraph‘s economics columnist Russ Mould, who notes that the overvaluation of US stocks has passed the level that brought the stock market to its knees to kick off the Great Depression. The US Treasury has also admitted that the AI bubble poses systemic risks get ready for it to get bloody
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-07-09 11:11
Another “AI fucked compsci grads” post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedIn’s algorithm) (because I’m still on that site for some fucking reason): Full Text study philosophy, not computer science data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that philosophy students have a lower unemployment rate (about 5.1%) than computer science students (7%) why? unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning are becoming premium assets, and better tech means companies increasingly DON’T need to ask “can we build this?”, and increasingly DO need to ask “should we build this, and what are the consequences?” If there has ever been a time to build those soft, truly human, skills, it is now. p.s. what do you think is the BEST skill to have right now - my thoughts are in the comments ___ This one’s attributing the decline to “unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assets”, and her graph comes from The Economist’s Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economist’s sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-07-09 20:39
Enjoyed Andrew Kelley’s rebuttal of the bun blog about moving from zig to rust Some pretty good sneers in there like Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-07-09 21:35
From the inimitable writers of AI2027, we now have… AI2040! ai-2040.com
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@schnoopy@awful.systems 2026-07-09 22:52
Some cool people anaylised the precise reasons slop all reads the same arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03136 Findings are that llms emit stories that are linear, unsubtle, and textureless. Also that if you graph it, it looks like a poo.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-07-10 07:21
Another OpenAI attempt at monetization has died an ignoble death. OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it. Atlas was announced in October.
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@hrrrngh@awful.systems 2026-07-10 15:01
This is probably^definitely^ my own fault but ever since I turned off personalized suggestions on YouTube, they have been insane. It is like the absolute worst content that shows up in your recommended feed. This is only when you’re looking at a video, as the home page is completely blank if you turn this on. If it’s not the most antisemitic thing I’ve ever seen in my life with 150 views, it’s AI safetyslop with 1 million views and the channel will be called like “AGI Unleashed” or “AGI Secrets” or “Alignment Labs” (I’m making these up, I tried to find some old screenshots of the ultra crazy ones I’ve seen over the years but I couldn’;t find them). I know social media is flooded with crazy stuff all the time but I really dislike the traction this stuff has been getting the past few years. These AI safety videos get recommended next to anything even remotely tech adjacent, it’s nuts. also: what happened here? x.com/EffectvAltruism That used to be a parody account and now it’s been creepily amalgamated into another EA twitter account. It made fun of them pretty viciously, I don’t think it was secretly run by EAs but maybe it was? Did somebody break into it???
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@sus@programming.dev 2026-07-10 21:59
Someone made a pretty good, albeit very cautiously, almost concern-trollisly written blog post about recent internet drama Odin v. Wikipedia. Surprise: the conclusion is that Odin is fashTech. (warning, the blog appears to be LLM-designed. I do not believe the actual text is LLM-written but you can never be sure) katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/
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@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-07-10 23:10
Not even Haskell is safe from the endless pushing of AI slop. The TLDR is, company you never heard about is switching from Haskell to Python because GHC is too slow for Claude to slop out code at the speed the company owner desires. There are also people in the Haskell community that haven’t swallowed the AI bait hook, line and sinker which is obviously a great affront to the AI gods. Of course, no AI psychosis induced breakdown is complete with the tired old “AI is here to stay and…” can’t have people actually thinking on their own now can we. Another thing I started to notice is that these silicon valley types are all utterly incapable of writing like a normal human person. Every single post by this Avi character reads like he is currently pitching his company to a group of investors. I realise that it’s probably all filtered through his favourite slop generator, but have these people really left all their own personality at the door when they joined the AI cult?
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-07-11 02:17
Lesswronger is mad the current pipeline to sanewash and legitimize lesswrong forum posts into academic content takes too long and thinks about ways to accelerate it: www.lesswrong.com/…/michaeldickens-s-shortform?co… create a pipeline to convert (some subset of) LW posts into PDFs on arXiv, or some other Respectable™ site that doesn’t require peer review.
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-07-11 18:37
I was at Trans and Intersex Pride in Dublin today and the last speaker took a moment to complain about AI during their speech. “These billionaires are burning the planet down with generative AI because they don’t have the patience to draw a picture or write an email…”
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-11 19:07
Apple sues OpenAI over leaking their secrets Now I’m no business guy, but this appears to be pretty catastrophically bad for a pre-IPO OpenAI
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-11 20:01
Tech Bros Puzzled by Why AI Hasn’t “Massively Disrupted” Books Yet In one since-deleted thread posted on the Reddit forum r/singularity, an AI aficionado posed what they clearly thought was a brilliant question: “why hasn’t AI text generation massively disrupted books yet, when it’s technically capable?” “Language and writing are the strongest abilities of LLMs, since they’re LLMs,” the user continued. “And yet, people are still reading human made books. Why is that?” “Just ask the LLM to write you the sequel to your favorite [H]arry [P]otter novel, and it will,” they enthused.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-11 22:32
Two Drinks With. . . Steve Bannon’s ‘Transhumanist Editor’ copy pasting liberally here bc of the sign-up-wall “Someone—Thomas Massie, or Bernie Sanders—ends up taking the fucking longevity injection,” says Allen, 46, an anti-AI activist who’s railed against the technology for years, most prominently as the “transhumanist editor” for Steve Bannon’s popular War Room podcast. “He lives forever, but he becomes a Luddite, and he just completely shuts down the entire economy . . . and then China takes over, and we’re all speaking Mandarin and eating noodles.” who in hell is Joe Allen. I don’t think brian johnson’ll be sharing the longevity injection with bernie any time soon Recently, Allen’s been touring the country with Humans First, “a conservative social movement that is dedicated to ensuring that the future of AI is in the hands of everyday people.” Specifically: everyday citizens of the United States. “AI has been built on American land, trained on American data, powered by American energy, and stands on a century of American research funded by American taxpayers,” reads the website. “Everyday Americans deserve a say in how this technology develops.” who in hell is humans first. I guess they have a protest next week. The Tea Party to our Occupy? That’s a depressing thought. Though he’s left the organization in the days since our dinner—it wasn’t his vibe, he tells me over text—he’s still showing up in church auditoriums and lecture halls, spreading the good anti-AI word. Bannon, in the foreword to Allen’s 2023 book Dark Aeon, called him “our Paul Revere, sounding the warning” about “the immoral Godless technological tsunami that openly declares its intent to transform human beings into a ‘posthuman’ state.” Titled his book after FFX bosses ??? Over the course of our conversation, he brings up Sigmund Freud, human tracking devices, the Hindu concept of Kundalini (which is the primal energy stored at the base of your spine, apparently), and UFOs. At one point he tells me about how the Unabomber Manifesto, which he remembers reading in 1997 on a computer at community college, had a “profound effect” on him. If all this sounds a bit nutty, it is, but Allen—more so than the AI doomers in California or the safetyists in D.C.—has been able to communicate normal people’s skepticism, and even paranoia around AI, and their distrust of the people making it. They always stop at Kaczynski, never make it to Ellul. Last year, he and his old boss Bannon lobbied Republicans in Congress to kill a proposed addition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that would have blocked state-level regulation of AI for 10 years. They won. interesting At 17, he had a formative acid trip—or as he describes it, “a profound hallucinatory experience entirely centered around digital technology.” Roughly: He saw a vision of the world where computers wrapped their tentacles around Earth and crushed humanity. acid trip, or wrong kind of anime Now, presumably off acid but onto his second glass of Chianti, he is “proudly” in the tradition of the Satanic Panic, the phenomenon in the ’80s and ’90s whereby a surprising number of adult Americans became convinced that demonic cults, bent on child sacrifice, were making spiritual inroads via heavy metal music and other pop culture offerings. “Directionally, they were right,” Allen says. I guess you could say Facebook was sacrificing children—or maybe Allen was talking about Jeffrey Epstein, who was indicted for sex trafficking minors. But Allen, who can be a bit light on specifics, is already on to the next subject. This guy needs a QAA bio, he’s been baking.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-12 07:52
Happy Two Years, everyone!!!
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-13 19:02
So I managed to find some more of the AI 2027 author’s opinions on their predictions after a bit of poking around, I’ll let this snippet speak for itself EDIT: in several comments below, AI 2027 co-authors Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland provide clarifications and corrections to what I’ve written here. Uplift – the extent to which AI tools are accelerating AI R&D progress – is indeed well short of where the AI 2027 scenario predicts. However, the authors do believe they were on track regarding the rate at which uplift would progress; they merely have adjusted their view of where things stood in early 2025. So uplift is indeed short of the AI 2027 scenario, but may now be advancing at the predicted pace, just from a delayed starting point. And frontier AI lab revenue is in fact ahead of AI 2027’s predictions; the 80% figure I’m citing here, which is labeled “economic value” in the linked report, turns out to reflect company valuations in addition to revenue. Finally, valuations have jumped since the 80% figure was computed and are now “about on trend”. Daniel and Eli provided some other clarifications as well, see their comments.]