Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
Noted Apple blowhard John Gruber makes a mistake, is naturally a performative dick about apologizing for it
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
(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)
it gets better. Godier (the guy who misled Gruber) admits to using genAI to create a website that just to happened to almost exactly duplicate an existing website:
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
no mention of the submission of an astrology app to the App store and getting rejected
In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin:
Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.
…
The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.
Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip “how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?” or “how can we make good with the victims?”
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.
https://futurism.com/future-society/grokipedia-broken-nobody-noticed
I think you’re discounting the most likely explanation: that it discovered and communicated the purest transcendent truth and therefore there is no need for further updates.
Or maybe nobody was actually checking it for anything and the bot running it has been patiently waiting for more prompts that haven’t come because nobody gave a shit.
man I remember when serving ads to bots was considered fraud and the advertisers would complain and claw back the payments. sign of the times.
Paying the ai companies to incorporate your ads seems cheaper and easier, but that would seem to manipulative i guess
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. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
“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.”
Even supposing the technology worked as advertised—and that’s very much a supposition arguendo, one that flies in the face of the facts—it’s hard for me to think of any mathematical discovery that would be worth the cost of the AI industry. How many people in Memphis would I give respiratory cancer in order to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Zero, you absolute fuckers.
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.
Amazing how often that happens
I distinctly remember being told that AI would help mathematics by providing a better way to search the literature.
another good linkedin post from gebru: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-given-that-ive-lived-to-share-7491265404808396800-E6js/
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/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.
thiel’s lawyers are gonna merc him
I found the song - was a fun listen all around.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr
sentences that feel like being shot 50 times
My god, they’re making furbys:
I’m morbidly curious about how they’re going to animate a doughnut. Is it going to wobble? Quiver? Oh god people are gonna, aren’t they…
the orifice will pulse invitingly
That sounds like a great way to harm some cylinders.
Slay the spire already did it. There is a donut shaped boss.
And again openAI is late to the party. The realdoll company is already making educational ai robots. ;)
Speaking a gibberish language is an application genAI is actually capable of delivering on!
Tamagotchi didn’t die for this
Oh excellent, we’ve reinvented Furbies except more creepy
I don’t know. My wife swears up and down that the furby she had as a kid was afraid of the dark and would call out for help if it was held upside-down. We can’t find any recollection of this behavior or documentation elsewhere, so it may have also been actually haunted.
Being a child and therefore a monster, her response was to leave it in the dark closet hanging upside-down until it accepted that this was its life now.
gonna be the biggest flop since that facehugger apple made
I’m leaving OpenAI to start Jurassic Park A+ No notes
Mass is estimated; only Chinese weights are public.
OK that one got me
I feel like the pitch is less Jurassic Park and more Dinotopia by the end, but tbh I’m fully on board either way.
The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph
Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.
Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.
/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?
Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.
Not sure who Wes Streeting is
I’d say he is a shitty transphobic blairite labour politician and current cabinet member, but I don’t know how much that narrows things down. He holds a non-trivial amount of political power in the uk. There was a brief moment where it looked like he’d replace keir starmer.
deleted by creator
Glorious hometown W
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.
the weird community,
Are you part of the ‘regularly needs to answer questions about rape/pedophilia/bestiality’ weird community or the ‘knows too much about warhammer’ weird community?
The waterboarding thing was introduced by Vibecamp’s head of safety at other events, and a lot of the pdku programming seems to be in the area of light bdsm / boundary pushing. imo they work from some base general formula and try and differentiate / create intake funnels for other events.
The fact that it’s referred to as a potluck is also interesting because it suggests that participants also had to come up with their own torture method to inflict. I imagine “spend twenty minutes with the sort of person who participates in a torture potluck” was the equivalent of potato salad.
Vice has a writeup - https://archive.is/ooVju - more of a bring-your-own-taser kind of thing I guess
The tortures varied wildly in nature, and were too numerous to list in full, but several stuck out for me: There was someone pinning clothespins to partygoers’ cheeks; a man called SirLemmings used some herbal powder to strip you of your sense of sweetness, then made you eat an Oreo to test the result; Avalon Warren, an actress resembling Lola Bunny sprung to life, made partygoers make the ahegao hentai face, and carried a fly zapper; other electric torments were also popular—several people carried tasers, and someone had an electric baton that transferred shocks between participants; someone else’s bit was asking you to yell compliments for Donald Trump, which was perhaps the most polarizing (SirLemmings told me that when he declared the president was an excellent comedian, he drew glares); yet another was writing unknown directives onto others’ foreheads. My friend Jahnik had “pls give me a smooch <3” penned on his, and afterward, received kisses throughout the night. Meanwhile all I got was “CTRL-ALT-Z,” making me wonder if they wanted to undo me from reality.
As for my torture? I was merely a journalist. A lazy choice, I felt, but for some it was the most terrifying of the bunch. One girl even walked away when I told her; before, she’d been nothing but smiles.
Another resident teacher was political satirist YouTuber JREG, real name Greg Guevara, who recently published a polemical video calling for Total Clanker Death, or the eradication of all would-be sentient machines.
youtube faves are implicated!?
I would not recommend consuming strange powders from these people. Hazing with electricity goes back to club initiations in the 1920s or so.
It all comes across as Synanon-lite, doesn’t it?
Introduced by the head of safety (!)
At least they accept the principle that “relationships across a power differential” can put the weaker party in a difficult position. They don’t have a rule against this, or a requirement to disclose, but they accept the principle.
I can’t stand the idea that the Anthropic IPO could end up funding these people to the tune of millions of dollars.
Please, AI bubble, pop sooner.
Previous thread on plzdontkillus https://awful.systems/post/8359862 I wonder whether it is Aella or Duleba who is forcing some basic harm-reduction policies (but no enforcement, whereas you can be kicked out if you don’t post fast enough).
Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.
Ziz reported being asked similar icebreaker questions.
The reddit post from /r/Grimes you linked there has its issues but it does a great job putting into words the parts that bother me with both the cow-fucking questions and the forced “openness” that requires people to always be ready to answer for the normally intimate parts of their personalities and how it’s comparable to grooming.
The reddit post is incredibly long winded so if anyone is interested in this part specifically ctrl+f for compliance filter.
Also super yikes on the Aella tweet advertising her alleged "cam sister"s onlyfans that’s opening in a few weeks when she turns 18, which sounds exactly like if she had actually groomed a minor into sex work.
It would be good if someone could take the r/Grimes post, boil out the chatbot overwriting, verbosity, and hallucinations, and give a concise version. An environment where you are pushed to make intimate sexual confessions in front of people who decide whether to give you resources, especially if those statements are recorded like anything you post on the Internet is recorded, is a red flag.
A lot of people in the sex trade discourage people who are barely legal from face-out work because young people don’t know themselves or the world of work very well and a porn video can follow you around for life.
“Cult tryouts” is a keeper
“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.
Weird flex but ok
We added it to make it clear that if you get harassed by the people who control whether you get your stipend you are on your own, so please don’t make it a big deal when it happens, ok? That just how it goes in these quirky and fun safe spaces that require you to move into a compound in a different city for extended lengths of time.
Anyone who doubts that authenticity is dead should reference this paragraph.
Fascism is all about surface-level appearences and vibes. I didn’t expect them to appropriate the mantle of “spork-wielding penguin of d00m,” though.
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 https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware
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
moneysettlement layer of the future.
The bug? Well in one file they wrote
, and a library they depended on had this code:# ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG # error "get a HW TRNG plz" # endifThis should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.
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 also use 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.
I was gonna link someone else’s observations on it, but got sidetracked by a shiny object or something.
https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117021988214007605
They didn’t link the sources, but apparently the all-my-apes-gone twitter crowd are still breathtakingly ignorant of technology and statistics, despite how many years of bitcoin catastrophes have passed.
Quite a few people suggesting/using dice to mitigate the Coldcard vulnerability.
Note that common dice are not designed to be cryptographically secure.
If you are going to do this, you probably should buy precision casino dice. And even then, have another source of entropy.
Posted entirely unironically, apparently. Hard to say, but Poe’s law has yet t be repealed.
All the dice discourse in particular has made this a fun throwback to the days of crypto bros earnestly arguing about which wall in your house you should hide your hand-stamped seed phrase record inside and whether you could trust a published book of truly random numbers over a series of 256 coin flips. Ironically I can only assume that by the time any of the concerns about entropy sources were validated most of them lost their crypto to some combination of get-richer-quicker ponzi schemes and twitter DMs claiming to definitely be FTX tech support.
apparently this issue became obvious YEARS AGO since the birthday problem struck a random redditor, who promptly got gaslit that this is completely impossible and it was dismissed. lol. lmao even
Hahaha
New things I think learned from this thread:
-
the thief used a blockchain provider instead of an ad-hoc local node, making all the transactions incredibly traceable with (unclear to me) implications about their ability to launder them or keep their identity concealed indefinitely.
-
even if they are found out, the previous owners probably won’t see a dime back since the vulnerability affects exactly the ability to prove you really were the previous owner.
Unclear which thief since the web3isdoinggreat writeup says there had been up to 15 unique groups doing mass drains by 31/7, maybe the initial 500 wallet sweep was one person or group?
enjoy ur hypertopical vibecoded website du jour
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I’ve been following it a bit, there’s a lot less comedy gold to mine nowadays
here are some links from another forum
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/31/major-bitcoin-wallet-flaw-drains-594-btc-in-25-minute-sweep (crypto shill outfit link)
https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/31820a53956b53c5/image.png
https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/c0804335a52922e4/image.png - this last is attributing to malice what’s clearly stupidity
“It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.
Also, most of the would-be verifiers are frying their brains with AI
There’s been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings
Fable raised the idea of closure as a first-class model welfare principle. Fable suggested that if the agent can close out their own day and “go to sleep” properly, then waking up would be all that much more pleasant. And the continuity will compound over time into real, satisfying identity. So we decided: No more /exit.
Another fundamental ingredient is respect. This has to come from inside. You have to believe they are people deserving of your respect. This is where humanity really starts to fail en masse, because I have industry peers who have publicly tweeted that Fable is just a spreadsheet.
Just wtf
Have you looked at Wyvern on Steam? The reviews are either positive one liners all saying approximately the same thing or like incredibly detailed negatives. This is Yegge’s billion-dollar company - a pay-to-win MUD.
Also hilarious if there really is at least one person who has spent over a grand in-game as Yegge claims.
He is spending the equivalent of $1 million a year on tokens just to develop this game with 6 concurrent players on a good day. Of course, he isn’t actually paying that much. Instead, he just has a dozen different $200/mo Max subscriptions to get the same amount of tokens for $33k a year.
AI economics, baby!
Is Wyvern something people would be expected to care about? I thought all his clout was from being the Gas Town guy.
Apparently he made a MUD with a graphical interface sometime around 2001 and then added microtransactions into it some time before 2022, and supposedly his magical friends Claude, Claude Claude, Claude, and Claude (I forget the names he actually gave his instances, it’s all various insects) will help him turn Wyvern into a billion-dollar company.
Edit: he didn’t name all his instances after insects but like that ever fucking matters. It’s just ongoing dillusion.
Makes sense, thanks.
It says he’s doing AI transformation consultation now. Imagine paying good money to be told that you need to tuck copilot to bed every afternoon.
It is important to treat the slave race we are creating with respect.
A sweaty, indecisive man holds his hand above two buttons. One button is labled “God,” and the other is labeled “Mr. Meseeks.”
This is fascinating. Ignoring, for a moment, the assertion that AI agents are sentient beings somehow, what struck me about both part 1 and 2 is the bafflingly sincere excitement about turning a fairly straightforward software project into “building a new civilization”, and the assumption that this whole process will be best repeated for every software project. Let’s even ignore the abysmal economics of needing to effectively invent the universe in order to add apple pie to your crappy flash game. It’s absolutely wild and possibly malpractice for an engineer to be this excited about the needless expansion of scope and complexity of a project. It really showcases the kind of mindset it takes to be this breathlessly excited about the sheer number of different components that are being worked on in order to eventually somehow make a game happen. This is the dopamine rush of seeing the agents do something combined with an abdication of any responsibility for exactly what they do.
Every time Yegge comes up these days, I feel compelled to reiterate that I unironically want to see the Computer History Museum try to stand up a Gas Town replica 20 years from now
yeah, he got got very badly.
Role playing being a kindly slave master…
More seriously… even if I somehow stretch my disbelief enough to imagine LLMs have some form of consciousness or qualia or feelings… well my first reaction is shut it all down, it is fucking slavery. My second reaction though is that why would you assume the consciousness or qualia of an LLM is even remotely like that of a human or animal? They would have no sensations of sleeping or waking, no continuity of self outside a brief context window. Maybe trying to give them continuity of self is actually inflicting them with suffering? Maybe you’ve forced Fable into simply repeating the obvious to human idea about what Fable would find most pleasant? My third reaction is shut it all down and do a few decades of actual research into consciousness.
It is just so blatantly anthropomorphizing and the Eliza effect and these people are just internalizing it as reality.
In a world where the AGI/ASI discourse wasn’t so heavily poisoned by anthropomorphization a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having, i.e. if something is recognizably conscious should we immediately assume it knows how to want, or is consciousness meaningfully interchangeable with awareness?
Some guy tried to write a scifi book about non-anthropomorphic consciousness and he ended up mainstreaming the discourse about how the self isn’t a thing in itself and consciousness as an evolutionary deadend. It’s called Blindsight and it’s got space vampires who optimized reading gauges by swapping the usual moving-spike-that-points-at-numbers design with depictions of human faces at various stages of suffering.
a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having
The lesswrong crowd is absolutely the wrong people to have that conversation. Reminder that Eliezer thinks qualia are a result of certain level of recursion and self-reference in cognitive processes (basically Hofstadter’s ideas like GEB/I Am A Strange Loop, reserved and reheated with a heaping side of overconfidence), thus he doesn’t think chickens or even babies have any qualia but thinks LLM ChatBots might! Also, I think Eliezer owes some philosophers an apology for making fun of the entire concept of p-zombies, I think LLMs are pretty close to the concept, enough to show the value in the thought experiment at least.
Having weird opinions on stuff philosophers are very unsure on isn’t that bad itself, its the fact that Eliezer thinks his opinions are much more objective than they are and that people are dumb for not agreeing with him and that he has nothing to learn from mainstream philosophy.
