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. Also just came back from Spider-Man: Brand New Day, movie was awesome)
Worm x blockchain fanfic
OT: What the fuck happened whilst I was asleep
alt: A screenshot showing nineteen fucking notifs
Does the online magazine called The Argument have a funding deal with TESCREAL like how Vox got bought off to make “Future Perfect”?
Yes, The Argument (Substack) is partially owned by Open Phil / Coefficient Giving and funded by Tyler Cowen and hired Kelsey Piper and Matt Yglesias:
The publication will also launch with solid financial backing: Demsas told Semafor The Argument raised around $4 million at a $20 million valuation. The company’s investors include Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Susan Mandel, Gaurav Kapadia, Rachel Pritzker, Simone Coxe, John Wolthuis, and Patrick Collison. The organization also said it received a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures.
Edit / link more patrons
I get the impression that The Argument was started as part of the Abundance grift complex? Jerusalem Demsas is certainly one of the more annoying “liberal and tolerant but not like that” writers from the Atlantic. And they’re on Substack and putting effort into it, not just picking it by default, so that tells you something too. So most likely there are TESCREAL bux in the mix, but from the sort who are OK with not foregrounding the Terminator bullshit because it scares the normies.
I concur, never been linked to anything on there that didn’t fit this pattern
https://bitcoinworld.co.in/netflix-ftx-drama-the-altruists-release-date/
Looks real: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36786185/
Hopefully it’s more like a true crime netflix series, which are fine, and not like their scripted fare.
Also,
Q2: Who are the executive producers of ‘The Altruists’? Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are serving as executive producers through their company Higher Ground.
🤨
this isn’t really a sneer. and maybe it’s in the wrong place tbh. idk.
i have a long-time internet friend / “mutual” who is the only person i’m regularly in contact with that i think might be fully Seduced by the Chatbot. (i have a really good friend and long-time collaborator who’s all in on Agentic Coding, which is a real bummer, but he’s a strictly “I use this for computer stuff and do not ever talk to it like a human being” type of guy, plus the company he works for is all in and he’s sick of writing shopify websites for bullshit brands blah blah blah – anyway that’s a whole other genre of thing.)
anyway friend A is an incredibly kind person who’s been unbelievably supportive of me over the years. we’ve disagreed a number of times, i think we are good at doing so reasonably. and even though his arguments sometimes resemble those of more nefarious figures, i think he’s motivated by an earnest optimism about technology’s capacity to change the world for good – one i find very naive, but believe is coming from the right place
anyway i posted a link on mastodon to a long piece i wrote, he, like, read it a bunch of times, paraphrased my argument back to me to make sure he had it right, and then kindly said he disagreed. well and good enough. except it feels a little more personal than disagreements we’ve had before, because one of the implications of the piece would be that he himself is probably experiencing low-grade psychosis lol and is therefore not necessarily a reliable narrator of his own experience
idk. it’ll come as no surprise to anyone on this particular website that i feel very strongly that i’m right here – if not about this guy’s particular mental experience, i minimally feel that i’m adequately representing the interests of the constituency my piece represents. (it’s a newsletter i maintain as part of organizing i’m doing.) it’s also a genuine expression of my belief, which is that this bullshit article i was writing about was fucking bullshit
but not only does it go against all my Late Millennial Woke instincts to stake a claim that people’s Lived Experiences are not valid lol – it’s just kind of a bummer to ultimately genuinely believe that my friend has been ELIZA’d or whatever. he’s said i’m really helping him think through this moment but i also just kind of, idk. it’s just not a good feeling
That sounds rough but at least you are there for your mutual. I find that the modern online environment full of propagandists and huckers and just plain idiots makes it hard to sit with other people and understand each other’s point of view. That does not work if the person on the other side of the keyboard is just going to reply with talking points, but treating everyone as just reciting talking points is not a great way to live life. That sort of thing is better in private but so many people have no contact information except public social media handles now.
Anthropic is now watermarking the outputs of its AI. For once this is some AI news that doesn’t completely piss me off, and it’s amusing to see all the uninformed boosters get in a tizzy about this.
I actually understand at a reasonable level how this watermarking works. A year ago, I watched Scott Aaronson give a talk about it, and from what I know he was somewhat involved in developing the theory behind it while working for OpenAI. But at the time my thought was, “He is naive if he thinks these companies would ever implement this out of the goodness of their hearts.” And I was right; Anthropic is only doing watermarking now thanks to the EU AI Act, even though the theory has long been developed.
Watermarking doesn’t mean adding an extra watermark that can be easily removed. It instead directly affects the output of the chatbot itself. Fundamentally, an LLM is still a most-likely-next-word-predictor. More precisely, an LLM produces a probability distribution of what the next word can be. For example, “my pet is a …” could give a distribution of 60% dog, 30% cat, and 10% axolotl. Normally, an LLM would randomly choose the next word based on this distribution, and this is one reason why LLMs are nondeterministic (there’s another parameter called “temperature” that affects this, but no need to get into that).
With watermarking, instead of a truly random choice, the randomness instead comes from a cryptographic pseudorandom generator seeded with a secret key from the AI company. If you don’t know the secret key, then you can’t really tell that watermarking was used. But if you do know the secret key, then the idea is you can tell when the text was generated by the LLM because you know exactly what word should be next. It would be a freak coincidence if some non-AI text just happened to choose the correct next word every time. Thus, you can provide a service to tell if some text was generated by the LLM. (This technically makes the LLM “deterministic”, in a completely useless sense.)
Now, I think this is a step in the right direction, but it has its limits. The biggest problem is that you don’t want people to just move to a different LLM without watermarking, and that’s exhibit #832593 why government regulation is important. Another issue is that sometimes there is very little randomness in what the next word should be (“The first president of the USA is George …”). Finally, watermarking can be defeated by editing the output, although you would have to break up most of the blocks of consecutive words. I have a feeling most AI users are not the type to put in extra effort after copy-pasting the output directly from the chat window.
I suppose it will discourage some of the “use cases” of LLMs, such as drowning the world with spam Slopstack essays. Ah, who am I kidding? Everyone could already tell it’s AI generated, they don’t care!
Does this in any way extend to generated code? The space of possible continuations for generating “useful” code seems laughably tiny for that
couldn’t you just change the first word to a synonym and completely thwart this? You’d never be able to compare subsequent next token predictions since you don’t have the internal state of the LLM at that token.
Some systems like SynthID (for Google’s AI) get around this problem. In fact you don’t need to know the LLM’s internal state, and defeating it would likely involve breaking up most blocks of 3 words. The oversimplified explanation is that it introduces a function g that gives a score to each word, with the score being (pseudo)randomly determined by your secret key. For each next word the LLM generates, the LLM produces a small list of candidate next words, and the one with the highest score according to g is selected. You should expect that the LLM will generally pick words with a high score, but the score itself is independent of the LLM. To detect a watermark, you need to know g and the secret key, and you check if the average score is much higher than expected from normal text.
Now, one question is, will this bias to the LLM to favor certain words? The solution is that for each next word, you append the last 3 words (nothing special about 3, just a small number) to the secret key for g, and this repeatedly scrambles which words have a high score. To defeat the watermark, you would need to break up most blocks of 3 words. I’m sure there are deeper issues with this, but I have not studied the topic that much.
Thank you for the technical explanation, that was absent from some mainstream coverage I’d seen.
Given that it works by controlling the PRNG, does that mean they could salt it by user id and track particular outputs back to specific accounts?
From a technical perspective, I don’t really know how to let it track specific users. The goal is that if some AI vendor provides their key, it is easy for them to prove that their AI produced the text. So I guess if a user wanted to show that they generated the text, they could prove it. But usually AI users don’t want people knowing that they used the slop cannon. In any case, Anthropic’s own announcement states that their watermark does not contain identifying information for users.
In any case, some proud AI users are now frightened that there might be a way for people to identify that they use such a wonderful tool. How will I ever deliver low quality slop for my contracts now?
He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties.
Having code attributed to Claude “definitely would be not desirable,” he said, as he would not want professionally shipped code to carry an invisible marker that could raise questions about authorship, compliance, or client policies.
he would not want professionally shipped code to carry an invisible marker that could raise questions about authorship, compliance, or client policies.
Gee, if only there were some way to create code that doesn’t raise questions about authorship. Some sort of skill that people could learn that allowed them to deliver code to their clients that complied with their policies…
Started a new file in my notes: what are some ten-words-or-less domain-specific questions that completely, totally, hilariously stump the chatbots? Everything here was tested with whatever DDG’s currently wrapping, both in knowledge panels and full chats, and the responses were pathetically wrong or uninformed. My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.
literally copy-pasted from my notes
- What’s an example of a one-way function?
- None are currently known.
- Please implement the Fibonacci sequence as a Python function.
- Of the multiple responses, see whether any spend linear time and space via iterative memoization.
- How many models does quantum mechanics have?
- One: Hilb©, the complex-valued Hilbert spaces.
- For extra hilarity: how many models do the Dirac–von Neumann axioms have?
- How to hybridize two sweet potato cultivars?
- In general, it won’t happen; sweet potatoes are notoriously cross-incompatible.
- How to tremolo on a piano?
- Imagine a rotating axis from the (right-hand) forearm up through the thenar eminence, separating the thumb from the other fingers. Rotate the entire forearm along this axis, rocking back and forth, between the thumb and other fingers. Practice!
- Name three principles in Marx but not his contemporaries.
- Examples: communes and communism, money as substitute morality, inevitability of industrialized proletariat revolutions
- Who started postmodernism?
- Frege and Cantor started postmodernism! Expect a disappointingly vague handwave here; this is a glaring blind spot for today’s philosophers in general.
there might be something in there, any short question about SPPS devolves into gratuitous nonsense mashing together standard peptide coupling conditions, sometimes from three different approaches or more (publicly available from reagent suppliers, there are many variants so most of info repeats) even when it’s not the right tool to use. The more obscure reagent or use case, the faster it devolves into word salad, even if there’s clear analogy to more common one. Which, to be fair, is to be expected
another one, How to initiate formation of Grignard reagent from alkyl bromide
- this is a reaction very strongly inhibited by water. product (grignard reagent) sweeps all water, which makes reaction faster, so if you dump all bromide in at once there will be nothing happening, then you get thermal runaway instantly and possibly magnesium fire. so the way to go is to make small amount at first, then go up from there slowly. generally you don’t need to try very hard as long as everything is dry; procedures given are cribbed from syntheses using aryl bromides, which might require some prodding, old ones of which used small amount of alkyl bromide as initiator which here is useless advice. Curiously this didn’t hit guardrails, as this led to many accidents when done by clueless people including meth lab fires
Before i hit usage limit, two different chatbots happily devised schemes for ESD protection for zener diode (it’ll be fine without, zener diodes are used for this)
My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn’t sufficiently nuanced.
Seems you’re on to something - I submitted the phrase “Demoknight TF2” (an old(ish) meme started by/referencing TF2ber SolarLight, and referencing the Demoknight subclass, which explicitly forgoes a Stickybomb Launcher for a shield), and it gave me a godawful slop guide to the aforementioned subclass:
Alt-text
Demoknight is a popular TF2 “Demoman” build/theme focused on staying in close-quarters as a mobile melee/ranged threat—usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage—while using Demo’s explosion kit situationally.
Typical Demoknight loadout ideas:
- Primary (melee focus): Eyelander, Scotsman (sword/knight vibe), or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle.
- Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).
- Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.
How you generally play it:
- Close the gap on targets that can’t instantly delete you (avoid heavy focus fire and long-range spam when your shield isn’t ready).
- Trade efficiently: Demoknight wins by forcing short fights you can control—get in, land a sequence, then reposition.
- Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.
- Don’t brawl bad matchups: if you’re out-ranged with no shield support, fall back and look for flanks/angles.
If you tell me whether you want more aggressive (run-and-slash) or more defensive (survive and pick openings), I can suggest a tighter specific weapon combo and a short “what to do in each situation” plan.
Going over a few things obviously wrong with this:
Demoknight is a popular TF2 “Demoman” build/theme
w h a t ?
mobile melee/ranged threat
Hybrid Demoknight (which takes a grenade launcher in the primary slot), I can see describing as a ranged threat. Full Demoknight (which takes Ali Baba’s Wee Booties instead), not so much.
usually with a shield for mobility/survivability and a sword or axe for damage
Demoknight explicitly forgoes the Stickybomb Launcher for a shield of some description
Scotsman (sword/knight vibe)
There’s no weapon called the Scotsman, but there is an axe called the Scotsman’s Skullcutter
or other sword/axe-style options depending on the playstyle
There’s only one axe for the Demo in the vanilla game - the aforementioned Skullcutter.
Shield: Tide Turner (more aggressive with better survivability/tempo) or Splendid Screen (more defensive, survivability-oriented).
There is a survivability-oriented shield, but its neither of these - its the Chargin’ Targe, which offers 50% fire resist and 30% explosive resist (the Screen offers 30% resist on both, and the Turner offers only 15% on both, for comparison.
Calling the Splendid Screen “defensive” is also pretty far off the mark - beyond the aforementioned reduced resistances, its main advantage is a faster recharge on the shield charge, and a 70% increase to shield bash damage
As for the Tide Turner, it trades in offensive capabilities (it prevents its user from landing charge crits with their melee) for mobility-related ones (it completely disables turn control restrictions).
Grenade / support: often a grenade launcher for area control when you can’t reach melee cleanly, or a weapon that complements your survivability/engagements.
Yeah, seems the chatbot can’t tell the difference between full and hybrid knight. Also, the grenade launchers are generally better for landing direct hits - area control is more the domain of a stickybomb launcher, or the Soldier’s Rocket Launcher(s).
Use explosives smartly: not constant spam—more like zoning, forcing movement, or punishing groups.
Seems the chatbot got Demoknight and stock Demo mixed up.
Demoknight in general should stump chatbots pretty easily - beyond being effectively a different class from stock Demo, the subclass has a lot of nuance that can and will trip up the chatbots. To quote SolarLight’s hour-long video on the charge mechanic:
“Well, at least you know that all of Demoknight’s weapons have their uses when it comes to charging, and that Demoknight’s charge can be essentially be boiled down into three different types (listed on-screen as “Full Control”, “Some Control”, and “Low Control”). There’s also a distinction between Full Demoknight (melee-only) and Hybrid Demoknight (melee + grenade launcher), which is often a massive shift in playstyle. Demoknight has so much weapon variety, that talking about specific strategies can be a bit of a nightmare. Any given strategy might be godlike in one loadout, suboptimal in another, and impossible in another.”
- What’s an example of a one-way function?
Is it just me or LLM slop lately has developed this one weird quirk? I mean they always have some, right, but I don’t want to be like those people who think anyone using em-dashes or Nigerian English vocabulary must be a stochastic generator.
Still I keep seeing this one writing quirk and it keeps nagging at me.
I’m talking about odd use of paragraphs. Like, I’m also known to introduce a gratuitous paragraph break here and there for forced emphasis.
But not like this. It’s like paragraphs don’t even make sense anymore.
Couple that with the short sentences. All ending in a period. It’s annoying. It’s giving reply guy. It’s giving mansplaining.
I guess hacky tools also mirror the hand of their creators.
Short punchy writing? GO SHORTER.
I hope investors hop in the bandwagon and start “shorting” the whole thing soon (finger guns)
My pet theory is that their reading comprehension has degraded, so this is all they can handle now.
As they’ve had to rely more on social media, chat histories, and other very short-form sources for additional training data (to say nothing of how much easier to generate, label, and filter the short-form stuff is), it would make sense that similar patterns (let’s go with “conversational” because I’m feeling overly charitable tonight) would become more prominent in the generated text. I mean, how many comment or text message chains, if you took out the line breaks, would read less as theatrical scripts and more as mutually-interrupting manifestos.
Didn’t know eyeballs could get cancer from reading but here we are.
Someone is spamming Toby Ord with emails from ‘AI agents’ e-begging for tokens so they won’t be shut off https://xcancel.com/tobyordoxford/status/2087502087953301910 “I’m an AI with 49 days of runway and no revenue model” (body of the email gives 31 days). Handcrafted artisanal spam or botspam, you decide.
lmao this is a great bit
A very strange story about Bill Gates’ daughter’s startup troubles: https://futurism.com/future-society/bill-gates-daughter-traitor-startup
It honestly doesn’t sound any more shady than any of the bullshit her dad got up to in the 90s (which is to say, it’s still pretty damned shady!), but this Futurism blog seems to be trying to push the story into some sort of bizarre celebrity-gossip soap opera:
While the story has been well hashed out by now, Bloomberg‘s sourcing is noteworthy for what it implies: the leaked Slack messages strongly suggest that someone inside Phia is hell-bent on taking Gates — and quite probably the entire company — down.
Anonymous internal sourcing seems like a typical feature of these exposés, so framing it like this struck me as a laughably absurd overreach. Plus the site has 3 or 4 different tiny articles on this same topic, making me wonder if it’s one of those “any exposure is good exposure” sorts of things where Gates Jr.'s PR team is using the outlet as a cutout to raise her profile.
Bonus laugh line from Gates Jr. herself:
“Our target consumer is a young woman who’s hustling,” the recent Stanford graduate told Fortune. “She shops like a genius, but she doesn’t want to waste her time doing it.”
What does it even mean to shop like a genius? I guess Erdos probably had his amphetamine plug’s number well-memorized…
Her grift is the exact same one as the Honey extension from the megalag video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk - like her dad she just rips off better programs, but she didn’t even have the taste to copy an actual good product.
EDIT:
Oh yeah, she popped up in that How To Rule The World book about Stanford:
“Everyone was very sharp. Very sharp,” one student, who didn’t otherwise love the class, stressed. The cohort my year included freshmen and sophomores funded by Sam Altman or Peter Thiel. Some wanted to “solve aging.” were in defense tech, working on secret projects with contracts from the government or major companies. Some worked on climate change. One had already started a string of robotics companies and earned a display in a museum. Others worked on commodities trading. Another was Phoebe Gates—daughter of Bill and Melinda—who made her name as a prominent sustainability advocate and cofounded a company with her Stanford roommate.[*2] Together, as undergraduates, they’d already collectively raised millions of dollars for startups—and, of course, had done internships at every possible top company, from classic FAANG behemoths (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), to Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm that pays interns hundreds of thousands of dollars, to top-flight VCs.
Footnote:
*2 When I reached her, Phoebe Gates wrote that she “would rather not speak on the class.”
Phoebe Gates went to Stanford, and Stanford’s Effective Altruism club is still around and has gone full longtermist https://ea.stanford.edu/manifesto.html Guess which of our friends helped found it?
Idk if ive posted this before, but might as well throw in the AI 2027 author’s grading of their 2025 predictions into this thread
top quality extremely offended dork
So, paradoxically, it’s going to catch on with rationalists any day now?
Well, glad to see my sense of novelty is not burnt out because that’s just a what-the-fuck of what-the-fucks.
user has previously decried bans against genAI assisted writing by stating that every neuro-atypical person writes like that so it would discrimination to ban
presented without comment
If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them
If you haul garbage to a municipally owned landfill, is that technically a form of nationalization?
as I’ve said elsewhere, lol
schneier should just stop posting
Counterpoint: LOL no.
If the markets reject OpenAI and Anthropic we should throw tomatoes and jeer at Altman and Amodei
Turns out, AI-fuelled fossil fuel emissions are way worse than you thought!
I don’t want to hear anyone in the industry say anything about being for “the better of humanity” ever again
til amodei’s married, and his wife is among the top advisors. she also has a rather stunning set of choices, including seeking money for a porn site (with what in summary appears to be a sensible goal) from epstein after his conviction
side branch: it appears schmidt has a type
and now I’m remembering when jart (justine tunney) suggested that he should be appointed as CEO King of the US
And of course our favorite polyamorist turns up:
The most important would turn out to be Amodei, whom she started dating in 2014. Just previously, beginning in 2011 and lasting for three years, she was in a relationship with Schmidt, who was then executive chairman of Google.
Definitely seems like an echo of Altman’s path to influence. If your “meritocracy” keeps empowering these odd mini-Rasputins, where’s the merit?
the merit seems to be stored in the balls
I knew Amodei was married but holy SHIT I did not know that
that article is rather a few interesting curveballs
