Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th July 2026
2026-07-13 22:12 UTC
Replies (24)
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-07-13 23:23
Lesswrong has some funny objections to AI: 2040. They buy the overall premise, sure, but even that much still leaves lots of gaps in the “scenario”. And they have even more galaxy brain takes… My favorite complaint: www.lesswrong.com/posts/…/ai-2040-plan-a?commentI… tldr; AI: 2040 is leaving out all the other sci-fi singularity tech just around the corner like genetic augmentations and cybernetic brain implants!
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-14 02:55
(ported over from previous thread) 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.] their full comments are here
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-07-14 11:10
When you definitely understand the anti-AI coalition you want to build
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-14 21:09
A double whammy: New York has become the first state to ban data centres and A Majority of Americans Now Support Seizing Wealth From AI Industry
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-07-15 01:38
Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability samoburja.com He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published and his highest educational credential is “studied at the University of Ljubljana.” The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-07-15 07:33
I’m not sure if we missed this one or if just I did, but there’s a class action suit against Eightfold AI. The company is accused of essentially creating a social credit score based on your digital footprint and using it to drop applications before anyone at the hiring company got a chance to see them. I spent the last two years watching my options for keeping my family housed slowly dry up while throwing out hundreds of applications. Now I’m concerned that it dug up my old reddit account from when I was a stupid teenager or decided that comments I made here weren’t suitable for participating in the goddamn economy.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-07-15 19:42
Samo Burja (“How Roman Emperors Handled the Succession Problem”), SlateScott, and POTUS have all expressed interest in Herbert Hoover. Is this part of a broader online right thing in the USA?
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-15 23:33
Was unsure if I was gonna post this but might as well. A letter about AI job losses has dropped its very short but has 200 signatures already (most of which are familiar names around here like Jack Clark) article that goes over it here
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-16 04:41
www.reddit.com/r/murdle/…/murdle_uses_ai/ Unfortunately you’re right about the Marot— in early 2022 I used a pre-ChatGPT transformer to come up with some of the symbolism, because I thought it was a funny source for essentially arbitrary “revelation.” It probably amounted to about 20-30 words in the final corpus and, although I only vaguely recall this, I believe I remember it being very bad at it. (Significantly more of it was decided under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.) OK I think we give GT Karber a pass on this one.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-07-16 07:45
So this exists: readscottalexander.com/stats/links Link Stats Across every post, these are the external websites Scott Alexander links to most often. “Links” counts every hyperlink; “Posts” counts how many distinct articles link there. So far that’s probably the clearest non-leaked emails documentation of what the good doctor actually believes.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-16 17:20
…substack.com/…/china-registered-the-humans-last Last July, China gave every internet user a state identity: one number and one credential, good at the bank, the hospital, and the civil-service exam. That system took effect on July 15, 2025.¹ Yesterday, on July 15, 2026, exactly one year later, China did the same thing for AI. These are agents, meaning software that perceives, decides, and acts on its own, a category well past the chatbot. As of yesterday, agents in China get registered on a national platform. They receive a digital identity and declare their capabilities the way a business declares its scope, and they can be recalled the way a defective car is recalled. A state planning analyst offered the official gloss: every agent gets a 数字身份证, a digital ID card.² Call it what it is, a birth certificate for machines. I never know how to parse mainstream reporting about China or Wilcox’s writing in particular. Maybe this means they have a universal kill switch. If you read it the way a lawyer would and the genre is unmistakable. It follows an agent through an entire life. At birth, registration: identity, declared capabilities, payment rails, a procedure for disputes. In life, an audit trail, because in sensitive settings every action must be verifiable and traceable, with blockchain named as the technology of record, so that no act ever floats free of a responsible principal. At death, recall, in the language of defective products. hmmm The man behind the partnership is Lin Le, founder of Lingshu Technology, the firm ranked first in China for blockchain and trusted-data infrastructure. The founder of the country’s leading trusted-data company signed for board-level entry into a police-agent vendor five weeks before a law requiring trusted-data audit trails on police agents came into force. OK back to be being terrified I guess.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-17 03:16
new polemics.md on luigi
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-07-17 05:26
self your masto feed has been magnificent
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-17 08:29
Tech execs are now travelling with bodyguards due to AI backlash great quote at the end: “That’s why people are setting warehouses on fire,” a former Pinterest employee named Bonnie Kate Wolf, who was laid off during an AI-focused restructuring, told the WSJ. “You can’t go back to serfdom. It really feels like the people in power want to be kings. Historically, that doesn’t work out for kings.”
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-07-17 12:44
Balaji’s free floating independent network state turns out to be subject to national laws of Malaysia scmp.com/…/malaysias-anwar-warns-any-israelis-joh…
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@self@awful.systems 2026-07-17 12:47
uggh, I dragged my feet too much on giving our instance more disk and the database fell over it seems to have recovered alright, but please check if there’s any weirdness or missing posts around the time when it went down
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-07-17 15:34
Wow this website is cursed: detrans.ai/en Conversion Therapy as a Service.
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-07-18 02:26
Patreon CEO Jack Comte uploaded a visionary CEO talk about AI and artists and the future. I don’t fully understand why they needed an interpretative dance section, or multiple people playing synthesizers, but I guess AI is good for artists, but also bad for artists, but also a big opportunity for artists, but also taking opportunities away from artists, but also? Also lots of bragging about how many millions of followers he has.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-07-18 08:39
Olivia Squizzle: Becoming a certified hater www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOQcpF9h9Z0 a heartwarming start to your day
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-18 16:34
Hey, new ludicity post. wonder why he did a saturday post, he’ll miss the HN monday cycle. …mataroa.blog/…/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-d… For this reason, our team has quickly learned while on an engagement not to ask anything about ongoing AI projects in any context – by the time that project has started, it is too late for the management team, and intervention is not possible until a crisis point is inevitably reached. There is no conceivable positive outcome. The failure rate is so high that even basic inquiry leaves us in an untenable position. Any coherent question about how it’s going, what the goal is, who is using it, constitutes an inadvertent attack on the chain of command responsible for the work because there are no good answers to anything. Matches my experience consulting these last few years. I’m still waiting to hear about the one gig where AI doesn’t eventually degenerate into a CYA circlejerk. Perhaps that is just the dominant eigenvector of the technical consulting process. Several of my peers now “AI-wash” their work, meaning that even when they can perfectly competently execute on their jobs to the satisfaction of their management teams, said managers are unhappy if the engineers haven’t used AI in the work. Been there too. Also, apparently layoffs.fyi added an “attributed to AI” filter - layoffs.fyi/ai-layoffs/
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-18 20:29
Daniel Faggella has found the old SneerClub and here too
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-07-19 01:05
That feeling when you’re an OpenAI exec and you realize the jig is up.
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-07-19 18:27
The “I will piledrive you” guy has a new post about working in an ai-pilled world now, and it’s pretty decent I find: …mataroa.blog/…/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-d… Favorite framing is that everyone is under enormous pressure not to commit heresy against the ai pilling, especially because you just don’t shit talk your customers.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-19 20:18
Climate activists pelt AI data centres with acid balloons GOOD FOR THEM