Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026
2026-08-02 23:59 UTC
Replies (22)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-08-03 11:54
an EA racist is offered a job, gets duck-milk-shaked, and worries that future AI models won’t be aligned correctly (i.e. be racist): www.lesswrong.com/…/richard-ngo-s-shortform?comme…
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-08-03 15:11
A new way to fuck with AI scrapers just dropped! Aaaaaand its fucking with screen readers, making protected text inaccessible to blind readers. File this next to the alt-text drama in the “AI bros set back accessibility” bucket.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-08-03 15:29
Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal | Wired via naked capitalism Are you liable when your random sentence generator does something random to someone else? Nobody knows!
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-08-04 02:24
On Tuesday 4 August, SpaceX has to release a quarterly financial report. On the second trading day after that, SpaceX insiders are allowed to sell another tranche of shares. So get some popcorn and a cool beverage 🍿 fool.com/…/spacex-earnings-aug-4-heres-why-aug-6-…
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-08-04 08:15
There’s been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-08-04 15:39
[takes a deep bong hit] Tokenomics
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-08-04 20:52
Clammy Sammy acknowledges Ed Zitron for the first time! xcancel.com/sama/status/2084663673570971990 His response is the Live Laugh Love of 2015 Silicon Valley platitudes: i would rather be an optimist and work hard than a pessimist posting about why things won’t work. it’s much more difficult and the most likely path is failure, but society fails if people don’t try. no amount of “it will never work” essays will drive society forward. Of course, building data centers that use untold amounts of rare earth metals, electricity, and water while spewing out tons of pollution and scraping every last bit of human content in order to remove people from their jobs by doing them badly is what drives society forward. Profits fail if oligarchs don’t try.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-08-04 21:42
Need ideas for ways to spend philanthropy money without helping absolutely anyone? Check out AI safety influencer bootcamp at Lighthaven! Basically Aella gathered like 60 people with a seminotable online presence to stay for free at Lighthaven for a month as long as they managed to publish at least one relevant video (15 sec minimum) each day. Rationalism ensued: “It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” [cofounder with aella] Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.” Uh oh A fellow recognized me and asked whether I was there for the “torture potluck.” I had no idea what he was talking about. It was exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-tolerate buffet of unpleasant experiences, for the sake of Fucking Around and Finding Out. […] Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu. So silly omg After a string of expected questions such as “What’s your take on AI?” and “What kind of content would you want to make?”, the form asked, “If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field. […] [Fernandez said] “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said. “Even the icebreakers, like everything, they want you to know that they’re part of the weird community,” one fellow told me. “‘Stand over here if you’re super sexually active, and over here if not,’ or like, ‘rate yourself based off of like, the last time you masturbated.’” The unifying thread, despite the fellows’ ideological diversity, is something like “openness.” Everyone at PDKU was willing to drop everything, move to Berkeley for a month, live in close quarters with strangers, and be perceived doing silly things on the internet. It’s really unclear what sort of ideological diversity is referenced unless it’s about having both blue haired and green goatee’d people. Maybe we’ve reached the point where everyone is expected to assume race science enthusiasts will be at a rationalist event at some capacity. Also the whole thing sounds like having tryouts for a cult. [Fernandez] says PDKU has a conduct policy, authored by him, that discourages relationships across power differentials. When I asked him how that gets enforced, in the absence of an HR department, he mentioned an unnamed community health lead. Same with the diversity thing, they are preemptively saying that there for sure weren’t no sexual harassment shenanigans this time. The third methinks thou dost protest too much comes as an extened NO U jab at other shady thinktankers trying to astroturf support for their thing. Amid the science communication, shitposting, and heartwarming summer camp energy, there’s a giant elephant in the room. “It’s another multi-million-dollar thing happening on a compound in California,” CJ said. “Does everyone think you’re just an annoying cunty psyop?” Don’t believe your lying eyes is apparently the note on which they chose to end this.
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@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 2026-08-05 03:01
There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story. For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers …block.xyz/…/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-… COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython’s deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG. Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free money settlement layer of the future. The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code: # ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG # error "get a HW TRNG plz" # endif This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not. As a C++ programmer this isn’t an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who prefer zero. But it’s less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for… We’ll have to addend that old saying: “don’t roll your own crypto unless the other person’s crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you’re probably better off rolling your own after all.” I personally don’t want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It’s 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I’ll end this comment with this glowing review: I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify. “It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-08-05 03:24
New odium symposium episode: www.patreon.com/…/22-on-chasers-ft-165582005 We talked to trans philosophy professor amy marvin about the intersection between trans chasers and stand up comedy
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-08-05 04:34
Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University spoiler > In the meantime, if any search committees are reading this: I am still available. My research program is innovative and well-structured. I have a clear vision for my independent career. > > It’s saved in a Google Doc that I can share with you. ChatGPT and I worked very hard on it.
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@FredFig@awful.systems 2026-08-05 19:12
OpenAI wasn’t doing it for this person, they’re going to work on telepathy?
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-08-05 21:30
jfc even my old company has full pivoted to ai - platform.mapquest.com/mcp sorry guys too little too late
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-08-05 10:16
Amazing installation instructions at github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql Install with an AI agent (recommended) The fastest way to get ghidrasql running end-to-end is to point an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, etc.) at the bundled installer prompt: install-prompt.md It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure. JFC. h/t to rairii: labyrinth.zone/…/96478395-64d9-452c-a906-9e6159cd…
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-08-06 03:41
Glorious hometown W
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-08-06 09:36
So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents. Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there. reddit.com/…/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_o…
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-08-07 08:04
Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip. Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down. He made a song instead. bsky.app/profile/…/3msgqy34gvc2d Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot: Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be” 💀 May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-08-08 01:27
My god, they’re making furbys: arstechnica.com/…/openais-expensive-smart-speaker…
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-08-08 22:21
OpenAI gets called out on their bs
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-08-07 15:50
Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI’s ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. scientificamerican.com/…/openais-latest-math-brea… “They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.” The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator. The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap. In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-08-08 17:44
Grokipedia hasn’t been updated for months: is it because it has been vibe coded into unmaintainability the people responsible for it no longer care the people responsible for it are utterly incompetent all of the above? I’m assuming that it isn’t “the llm bills were too high” just yet, but maybe it could be that, too. futurism.com/…/grokipedia-broken-nobody-noticed
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-08-09 06:49
Noted Apple blowhard John Gruber makes a mistake, is naturally a performative dick about apologizing for it daringfireball.net/…/retraction_app_store_rejecti… (nothing to do with AI or crypto, I just think Gruber is a dick. And the subject of the story - an app developer who apparently felt so secure in his indie rep he could do some light fraud for clicks - is a recognizable figure)