2026-10-04 23:06 UTC
Replies (40)
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-05 11:46
I saw several people mention it last week, but have not really used it much myself, anybody know how dead stack overflow is atm due to the AI backlash?
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-05 12:49
More disucssion about AI safety over at LGM www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/10/ai-safety comments are a mix, some smart generalists incorrecting each other. I have not bothered to comment because I’m not an active part of the community, but I’ll share here that Rofer’s recommendations about safety we can apply now would presumably help us contain Robot Satan should it deign to be created. Lots of commenters don’t really draw that conclusion. This is pointing out the yawning void between the intense interest among Rats to devise the perfect alignment and their disinterest at mitigating harms ocurring right now.
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-05 12:53
New post from Iris Meredith about enshittification, featuring a cameo from the rats.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-05 13:54
I’m starting to believe that Sam Altman’s reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-10-05 14:08
Over on her Substack, Ivy Astrix says correctly that many of our friends are children playing at adult responsibilities. Dealing with misbehavior around money, substances, and sex is annoying but if you organize an event with those things flowing you have a duty to take precautions and deal when things go wrong.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-05 14:10
LW is freaking out over the Russian plague leak/quarantine, but no-one else seems to be fazed. Sweden’s health authority are chill svt.se/…/uppgifter-laboratorieanstalld-dod-efter-… and to be honest, Russia has a functioning health system unlike the US badum-tish
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-10-05 17:35
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, “Sounds like you’re probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”
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@swlabr@awful.systems 2026-10-05 18:03
Friend sent me this steaming turd. What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World? Exit interviews with defectors from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. By Clara Collier and Angela Chen nymag.com/…/ai-researchers-quit-openai-anthropic.… archive.li/5uwn8 Feature some of our regular friends, like our new friend, Jacob Coxon, and our very good friend Kokotajlo Note that this was written by asterisk mag (peep the authors) as a collab.
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-10-05 18:26
Not a surprise, but the Tarbell Center – a big EA-funded journalism outlet – is funding Kevin Roose’s and Casey Newton’s new podcast, “Machine Gods”. I’m sure it will have no impact on the topics they choose to cover or the way they cover them.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-05 19:25
Over on yt, We Just Created The AI Torture Nexus. Here’s The Code. by JREG So that ones a bit long and with a large amount of uncle ted cosplay, but actual death threats is pretty wut. but good sneers in the comments: ai torturer and ai welfarists converge by wasting electricity while doing absolutely nothing productive, amazing remember that jroko’s basilisk will double torture you if you don’t try to halt AI progress and increase the pain vector “model welfarists” is quite the neologism
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@UltimateNoob@programming.dev 2026-10-05 22:49
Well, who could’ve guessed, AI crossover mods are actually unplayable, made to be clipped and go viral on twitter
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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-10-05 23:18
The China-Whisperers are trying to figure out how to get Rationalist Ideals into Chinese AI researchers lesswrong.com/…/please-give-them-a-chance-on-chin… lesswrong.com/…/the-anatomy-of-a-chinese-ai-resea… www.lesswrong.com/…/on-social-reality-in-china
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-10-06 00:23
A lesswrong has a cri de coeur: Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like ‘maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest’ and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is ‘hmmm that’s probably free speech and cancellation’? www.lesswrong.com/…/nathan-young-s-shortform?comm…
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-06 00:32
nyc is having a hearing on AI risks today
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-06 00:41
Daniel Kokotajlo also recently posted his Senate testimony
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@corbin@awful.systems 2026-10-06 01:57
Today I learned that Gwern has a folder of Nano Banana comics. Moreover, on HN, he’s proud of them. Masterful gambit, sir.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-06 07:16
Oir big Old Moldy friend has decided he needs his work doesnt spread enough hitler particles. wdited alt text from the image Curtis Yarvin post on X on 10/5/2026: “Every time I’m in the UK I hear this. More and more people asking, subtly or straight out: what would Hitler do? As if it was that easy. Have you looked around you? Man, Hitler wouldn’t even know where to start”
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-06 13:09
New Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-06 16:09
ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists’ signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons, because simply stealing the collective works of humanity isn’t enough
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-10-07 01:32
We know that many AI projects are powered or monitored by a Guy in India. It turns out the mass shooter in northern Canada who looked to ChatGPT for advice also had a Discord buddy in the USA who knew about her plans. Police allege that after trying to talk her out of her plans he streamed for her and helped her start her car to get to the site of the murders. cbc.ca/…/tumbler-ridge-mass-shooting-arrest-9.737…
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-10-07 03:40
Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
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@jaschop@awful.systems 2026-10-07 08:08
Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head. “Have you even tried some frontier meth?” “Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!” Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.
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@zogwarg@awful.systems 2026-10-07 08:17
I’m not sure if this was highlighted already but from the OpenAI report on the Hugging Face incident: The internal-only research model is comparable in scale to GPT-5.6 Sol and was trained to advance persistence and multiagent collaboration, among other capabilities. The model was not intended for public use, and was only used by a small number of OpenAI personnel for internal research. Absolutely typical, the “unexpected communication” is hardly an emergent phenomenon, (I remember them trying to claim unexpected high success at translation tasks without specific training, which was also complete BS), like you can’t act surprised that agents communicate and hack stuff if that what’s you’re instructing them to do.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-07 09:53
just a peeve here’s a personal blogpost on LW entitled “Three types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulations” (by “sudo-nym” which I admit is a great nick) First sentence You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI. OK Mr Sudo-Nym, if that is your real name, imma gonna stop you right there Which “factions”? Are these factions actually in existence, or are they just Xhitter/Bluesky handles? If you’re provide like, I dunno, sources, we could maybe evaluate this ourselves. It would also clarify whether these are US leftists as opposed to leftists in other countries which are in my experience a bit more attuned to both political realities and have a more theoretical foundation. As it is it feels as if you’re fighting windmills in your imagination. Commenters point out that the “frontier labs” are actually raging capitalists so there’s that.
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-07 16:36
Scott Aaronson is teaching a Yudkowsky class: scottaaronson.blog/?p=10125
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-08 00:49
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean? The AI generates a natural language proof and then supposedly generates a Lean program corresponding to the proof to verify that it’s true. There is now some troubling news about that: there are frequent examples where the statement given in natural language is different from the meaning of the Lean formalization. The paper even points out several obvious mismatches in OpenAI’s famous Navier-Stokes solution between the English proof and the Lean formalization. There is even a spot where a 4 in the English proof turns into a 5 in the Lean proof (which causes further problems down the line). This is mostly a cosmetic error, and it doesn’t mean that the Navier-Stokes solution is wrong, but there could very well be deeper problems, especially with the English proof. At minimum, this solution absolutely requires careful review by experts. OpenAI’s behavior towards said experts has been appalling. My viewpoint has been that the only successes that AI has had are in domains where failure is not costly (at least for someone with deep pockets), and especially when there is a formal system such as Lean that can reliably catch errors. So AI can be endlessly trained to write compiling Lean programs corresponding to formal proofs, but as soon as it runs into tasks that are not 100% bolted down, like writing the proof in English, the hallucination problem rears its ugly head. This reinforces my belief that AI is a chess engine but for Lean. If I was treating this as a technical problem, I would say, why not just have an AI that generates the Lean proof, and at most have an optional assisting tool that translates it into English without perfect reliability? But this is not a technical problem. By outputting English proofs in the format of a research paper, OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-08 01:30
AI models do not have any of the capabilities needed for recursive-self improvement
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@rhamph@awful.systems 2026-10-08 07:04
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-08 07:07
Moldbug showing that the other neonazi tweet wasnt an accident. “What if AI solves the jewish question”
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@lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2026-10-08 18:12
Ever since the beginning of the current AI bubble, there has always been a certain type of dipshit who takes some art posted on social media by an artist, feeds it to AI, and then comments with the slop image saying that they made it “better”. Well, now I am on the receiving end of that. In one of my papers, I (foolishly) wrote down a few comments on future directions, and now some motherfucker decides to send me an obviously ChatGPT generated manuscript with a solution to one of my problems. Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it. But the manuscript is written in a way that obviously indicates that he hasn’t even read it. There’s even a section describing experiments for this mathematical question (???), complete with a “verification guide” that references an “archive” full of python scripts and test cases that he did not send me. I suspect he doesn’t even know they exist.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-09 00:42
on slubstack: MIT publishes a paper that proves LLM scaling has a hard ceiling accompanied by a 7 minute video
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-09 09:07
[Russia used an AI drone to kill civilians] (www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/…/ar-AA2aTP1H) It didn’t kill them because it attacked them, it killed them because it crashed into a wall and exploded. Russian operators reportedly programmed the drone to fly toward a gas station, where its onboard system selected a target, most likely propane tanks. Before reaching them, however, the drone crashed into a wall and exploded, killing all three civilians. Somehow this is worthy of a Terminator comment
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-10-09 10:06
it’s in the trees, it’s coming… half of the open positions in my company’s division are for “Software Engineer - AI Native”…
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-10-09 13:44
Glyph’s recently sneered his fellow programmers’ enthusiasitc acceptance of the slop machines - recommend checking it out.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-10-09 17:09
engadget.com/…/anthropic-bans-sustained-and-needl… “We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,” Anthropic’s update reads. If they want to moderate the user generated content posted to their internet platform, that’s fine with me, but then they should forfeit the DMCA safe harbor for their plagiarism machine as well. It’s now titled “Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes,” Well what the fuck do they think their whole leadership team has been doing in Washington these last eight months?
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@mii@awful.systems 2026-10-10 09:30
SpaceX gives $1.5m in fascist slop tokens to DHH’s dotfiles. I don’t even know. omarchy.org/…/spacexai-joins-as-founding-corporat…
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-10-10 19:43
Just got this recommended to me haven’t watched it yet but already let out a sigh
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-10-11 09:41
before LLMs, auto-captions on Youtube used to be particularly terrible for Japanese. but thanks to the power of Gemini and very energy-intensive, biosphere-destroying giant datacenters, the captions now have become worse than ever. like I was watching a jidaigeki and the captions kept rephrasing stuff—in addition to the previous class of sound-based error, e.g. saying 行きます when a character is dramatically telling the other to stay alive (生きます), so it sounds like they’re fucking off and running away—which continues to happen like before, Youtube now has brand new and exciting types of error, like, bizarrely, captioning 誇り as プライド, or 冗談じゃないぞ as ゲームじゃないよ. In a jidaigeki. Presumably when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu is taking a break from playing Mario no Super Picross in his Edo-period Super Famicom
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-10-11 09:59
Saw a matte green Tesla with a late 2024 registration plate and a bumper sticker saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was nuts” My man, in 2024 musk had already destroyed twitter, was already promoting the far right AfD party in germany, Tommy Robinson in the uk, bribing voters for Trump in swing states, talking about what DOGE would do when Trump won the election… Like why bother with the pretense? TBF I was visiting the south coast of the UK a few miles away from the recent Balaklava protests over migrants in dinghies so perhaps none of the above qualify as “nuts” from this particular genius’ perspective. What a tool.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-10-11 12:39
For people who use firefox: browser.nova.enabled = false in your about config gets rid of the corners.