Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026
2026-07-26 23:03 UTC
Replies (33)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-27 12:05
I was going to offer this up as a sneer but I think the author is probably feeling very unwell and upset lesswrong.com/…/my-ai-slavery-interviews-are-cens… also using LLMs is probably not helping their case
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-07-27 14:09
Clamuel did another podcast. I don’t want to waste my time watching it, but I want to sneer at some choice quotes from news articles breathlessly reporting this stuff as gospel 1, 2 “We are now, like, in the singularity” Is the singularity in the room with us right now? Even the people on X the Everything (Including CSAM) App aren’t so convinced. Altman said on the podcast that just a decade ago, the so-called singularity still felt like a distant and improbable dream — something he and his colleagues would discuss casually over lunch. “Now we’re actually in the moment that we used to talk about at the lunch table in a very not-serious way,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world.” Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome, now that the singularity is here? Oh wait, he’s speaking in the future tense again, never mind. It really is a force of habit. It’s also funny how he talks about how positive things are gonna be immediately after the super scary hack done on Hugging Face (really due to incompetence on both sides). Oh no, the AI is gonna kill us all! It’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world. Later in the podcast, Altman criticizes AI leaders who have repeatedly warned that AI is dangerous. He didn’t name Anthropic, his primary competition, but its CEO, Dario Amodei, is well-known for making dire predictions about the future in his calls for greater attention to safety. “I also think some of the alternative visions painted by other companies are quite terrifying,” Altman said. “I’m going to make sure that gets pushed against and is not what happens.” At least Clammy realizes that all the doom trolling about how AI will replace and destroy all humans turns out, surprisingly, to lead to overwhelming negative public opinion. But this statement truly reassures me that Scammy has good intentions about AI safety. He will make sure this is pushed against and is not what happens. He wouldn’t want another super scary, dangerous hack that just so conveniently turns out to be excellent marketing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says one of his biggest concerns about AI isn’t whether it becomes too powerful in and of itself, but that a single company could control that power. Yeah, it would be really bad for Anthropic to control all the power of AI. It would be a disaster to hand everything over to Anthropic. “Every time that humanity has traded off its liberty for safety, it’s been a long-term net loss,” Altman said. “We are going to put this in the hands of people. We’re going to empower them. We are going to let society express its ideas and use this technology in the way they want.” Society is expressing its ideas about AI, all right. But I feel like they aren’t what he has in mind. Altman, meanwhile, said preventing such power from becoming overly concentrated has long been central to his vision for AI, even as his company continues to keep its own models closed. “For so long now, I have felt focused on this singular goal of abundant intelligence and a belief that incredible human prosperity will come from that, as long as we don’t have a weird power concentration and kind of a new authoritarianism,” he said. Well, we seem to have a weird power concentration and “kind of” a new authoritarianism, but I don’t see any abundant intelligence and incredible human prosperity. Lots more sneers on the Better Offline subreddit.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-07-27 14:50
So it’s been 7-8 months since the software industry decided that AI agents are good now and that you can do a year’s work in 1 hour So… Where are all the amazing and wonderful AI generated software products? Where are all the companies using agents to leave the rest of us behind? All I see are one-shotted maintainers, big marketing stories with little substance and a pile of detritus made up of abandoned vibe coded projects. It’s almost like AI agents make you feel more productive but actually slow you down (paywalled sorry)
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-07-27 16:57
Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I’m linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini’s output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I’m no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.
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@aninjury2all@awful.systems 2026-07-27 16:27
The only thing more grotesque than Palantir are its supporterts
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-27 18:17
The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism choice quotes: More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing). In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down. Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation. If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy. At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims. We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-27 19:10
the AI industry is (still) widely despised
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-27 19:56
“Other Scott” Scott “Unicorn Feces” Galloway appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of California. dailybruin.com/…/gov-gavin-newsom-appoints-podcas… well that wasn’t on my bingo card. what’s next, Bill Maher for governor?
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-07-27 23:13
Aella took one of her shitty twitter surveys and made an (dis)infographic, which made it onto the subreddit /r/moralityscaling, which made it to /r/whowouldcirclejerk where I saw it, so now I’m sharing it with you. CW for Rape, Transphobia, implicit rape apologia Crossposted from our subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/…/scalers_need_an_intervention/
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-07-28 15:07
Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times: This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the “Effective Altruism” propaganda network. Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-28 16:11
zerohedge sponcon so obviously a grift but wtf is this AI Black Paper by Jim Rickards zerohedge.com/…/sobering-july-29th-announcement-s… Have the goldbugs been reading Zitron? or just an extremely late pivot from btc to ai? or flooding the zone? Anyway who the hell is Jim Rickards? Another week, another guy. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:James_Rickards “AI Black Paper” is catchy enough though, should be a goth band.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-07-28 16:15
As an interesting follow-up to the ai-does-maths-using lean4 stubstack comments on Sunday, an llm accidentally uncovers a bug in the lean4 kernel. Summary by lipn.info/…/116997917683191056 To summarize: an AI agent let loose provides a sorry-free proof of the Collatz conjecture the proof is detected as actually being a kernel bug the bug is related to (nested) inductive types, for which there is no clear theoretical specification: the kernel’s code is the reference external checkers (lean4lean and nanoda from a week ago) reproduce the bug, because they essentially copied the reference kernel implementation And so AI raises the bar for kernel correctness by a lot without a clear type-theoretic understanding of what is actually implemented, we’re toast external checkers help to catch implementation bugs, but without a clear specification they can’t catch logic bugs
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-07-28 16:16
LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity: Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop “art advice” recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin’ knows: Transcript/desciption ___ I’ve already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y. An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if they’ve dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam. It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who we’re dealing with. Make sure “helpful” new users aren’t just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-28 20:20
Gary dunks on CEOs peddling Singularity bullshit
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-07-29 02:08
It sure is a zany coincidence that all the major American AI companies have come out either for or against open weight AI models with grand ethical and/or patriotic concerns all at the same time isn’t it? Most recently our pal Zuck! wsj.com/…/the-ai-future-is-for-everyone-a0c24e20
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-07-29 11:44
Missed this paper last week from Google Funny how now that it’s widely known that the general public hate AI, companies producing AI are softening their “it’s going to take your job” stance. Surely just a coincidence
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-29 15:22
a stock-slobber posts a cri de cœur about the coming automation of maths and HN says it’s no biggie, think how productive the field will become …substack.com/…/the-dark-night-of-mathematics news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681 btw the language in the post is bad enough to be entirely human-generated For me, the affective quality of learning mathematics is empathetically tethered to an act of discovery and creation. Before you a channel through which humans have accessed the ineffable and sacred for thousands of years is being sealed for eternity.
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-07-29 20:42
Google shut down the AlphaFold team, trying to reassign the people behind the super interesting problem of using ML to predict protein structure from sequence onto chatbot development. A whole bunch left the company. www.engadget.com/…/google-shuts-down-alphafold/ The Business Idiots are truly running the asylum.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-07-30 02:12
AI Crisis Flowchart spotted on linkedin spoiler and the actual article: lawfaremedia.org/…/the-ai-that-hacked-its-way-out… quoted zvi haha :| To be fair, the safety community can plausibly claim vindication here. At worst, an autonomous agent that breaches containment and attacks a real third party is precisely the scenario researchers have warned about for years, which enthusiasts have routinely dismissed as speculative. And at best, the company in charge of maintaining safety failed to construct an adequate containment system. are you fucking kidding me, they have been DDoSing sites for months, everybody knows about it, and the “safety” community has done jack shit the entire time and has offered zero solutions. I know multiple companies that woke up one day to 10-20k netlify bills until they could stand up an anubis. Just let hugging face sue the idiots, it isn’t like law enforcement will do anything even though there’s already laws on the books for unauthorized access, industrial espionage, etc etc etc.
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@saucerwizard@awful.systems 2026-07-30 03:15
More insane cult stuff has emerged - this time its MAPLE. insidemaple.com/…/the-high-control-dynamics-at-ma…
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-07-30 03:31
There is something about this picture, a warehouse full of books to be destroyed by Anthropic for training data, that just makes me sick. Knowing that they are destroying books in the abstract is bad enough, but seeing the sheer scale of it makes me viscerally angry. Karen Hao called her book Empire of AI for a very good reason. The empire has all these noble narratives of bringing civilization and progress to the colonies, but in reality the empire only sees resources to be extracted, repackaged, and sold back to their subjects at a fee. Kudos to those who saw this immediately and fought against it. Shame on those who believed in the narrative of progress, to the point where many of them are collaborators with the empire. Whenever a smarmy fellow on Linkedin posts about how AI is making so much progress in coding or math, I want them to see this picture. I want them to see the videos of families in tears after a data center takes away their home with eminent domain, and the other families who have to deal with the resulting pollution. Remember that it all came at these costs. I hope it was worth it.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-30 10:40
A LWer runs the numbers and doesn’t run away screaming like Zitron: www.lesswrong.com/…/the-biggest-bet-in-history Note that this implies massive efficiency gains to the economy. For their one-third slice to equal 8% of those salaries [59% of the total workforce in the USA], the total savings (productivity across that share of the workforce) will need to rise by roughly 24%. So they are absolutely serious about this, and are betting heavily that the productivity boost arrives within four years.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-30 10:41
Enjoy today’s craziest link: atomarine.co
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-30 14:44
CNN: AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner forced to unwind all public stock positions after steep losses, sources say I vaguely recognize the name, apparently he’s a snot-nosed 25-yr old who got fired from OpenAI
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-07-31 13:35
The OpenAI hacking incident has put everyone on edge. Anthropic, not to be outdone, decides to publicly announce that they have committed not one, not two, but three crimes! Come on! I was told this wasn’t a marketing campaign!
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-07-31 19:04
Behold, the Singularity!
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-07-31 19:29
Coindesk: Major bitcoin wallet flaw drains $38 million worth of BTC in 25-minute sweep A wallet’s seed, the secret phrase controlling the funds, is meant to be drawn at random from a pool so vast that guessing is hopeless. Coldcard’s firmware was not doing that. According to a report published by Block’s Bitcoin engineering and security teams, a build setting told the device to skip its own hardware randomness generator, and a check in a supporting library tested only whether that setting existed rather than whether it was switched on. Key generation quietly fell through to a basic software substitute seeded from the chip’s serial number and clock registers.
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-08-01 00:48
Onboarding at my new job means I am now “Certified AI Ready” whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn’t having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-08-01 04:56
So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.
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@dgerard@awful.systems 2026-08-01 09:56
Kai Lentit: Interview with a Longevity Maxxer in 2026
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-08-01 19:13
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there’s a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they’d already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it’s not nothing, but it’s also not the end of manual maths. opinions on maths Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be. The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We’ve known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it’s not likely that we’ll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it’s not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO. The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant’s theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You’re not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn’t make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard. The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don’t think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don’t get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds. I don’t have anything to say about the other four results. They’re not nothingburgers but they don’t depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-08-01 12:49
So Hank Green is apparently stepping back from his shit for a while after admitting to using AI for research and scriptwriting and acknowledging an unhealthy relationship with the dopamine hit he got from using it. I think this makes him one of the first high-profile users to acknowledge the problem? Which can’t be a good sign for the bubble.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-08-02 11:57
Sure sounds like aspiring and/or existing professional mathematicians are taking the latest GenAI assault on their craft either with shock or horror, or with full-on welcoming of their new robot overlords borretti.me/…/mathematics-without-mathematicians I for one know who to point and laugh at when the revolution comes.