Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 for starting this.)
Edward W. Niedermeyer, who wrote the book on how Tesla is a tax fraud and pump-and-dump disguised as a car company, will livestream the SpaceX IPO Friday https://atmo.rsvp/p/niedermeyer.online/e/3mo23aiagjs3t The real drama will be spread over at least a month.
Remember, investing is about decades and national economies not days and individual companies. If you think the US stock market is going to become more like Russia’s than France’s, you can make a policy and act on it to reduce your stocks’ exposure to the Mega-IPOs.
New booster irl fanfic just dropped: https://europe2031.ai/
It openly admits to being an AI 2027 knockoff, although I will give it credit for having a much more grounded scenario (Europe in economic ruin compared to gloriously transformed China and USA, whereas AI 2027 described the world going full singularity) and having a longer timeline (5 years to economic transformation is relatively sane compared to 3 years for an AI God to be born)
Some highlights in sneering:
The hours Christian’s team pulled were insane – seventy- or eighty-hour weeks, people sleeping in the office.
One of the character’s is basically an idealized SV AI startup founder, complete with all the insane startup tropes like working the 80 work week to grind out success. Also the fact that his name was Christian and the sort of chiding pitying attitude he had towards the other character, Caroline kept making me think of Christian Gray and 50 Shades of Gray.
Someone mentioned, in passing, that they thought artificial general intelligence - AI that is better than any human at most tasks - was probably two or three years out.
This is something of a side note to this scenario, but it annoys me ever single time it comes up so I will keep complaining. The boosters have very willfully moved the goalposts. Wikipedia gives the definition as “Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of artificial intelligence that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.” Boosters have, to varying degrees, tried to dilute the definition to ‘most’ and not ‘all’ and swapped ‘cognitive tasks’ for ‘benchmarks and narrowly defined tasks’ and then claimed success and accused people insisting on the original definition of moving the goalposts.
Standalone American AI tools are considered a data-protection risk.
This ‘scenario’ has an ongoing theme of Europe foolishly being cautious around the risk to their data American AI companies present. It is hilarious this scenario mocks this attitude just a few days after Anthropic has made their policies towards users data even more openly contemptuous.
The infrastructure story is just as grim. The largest AI supercomputer in the US runs at 1,250 megawatts. The largest in Europe runs at eighty-three.
So I couldn’t a single convenient quote for it, but an ongoing point of idiocy of this scenario is that it takes the ‘planned’ American AI data center build-out completely for granted, assuming all the currently released numbers are true, the plans will be met on schedule, and data center build up over the next 5 years will radically surpass them. Ed Zitron has pretty much shown all three of these stages of purported numbers are complete bullshit.
Up to this point, everything we’ve said has happened – with only Caroline’s and Christian’s personal stories representing fictional elements. From here on out, we start speculating. We no longer single out individual AI companies, and instead refer to made-up actors: Atlas for the leading American AI company, Helios for the leading European company, and Zimo for the leading Chinese one.
They are even copying AI 2027’s stupid shtick of coyly swapping out names instead of referring to real companies!
Works councils slow the deep adoption of powerful AI tools; employment protections make it hard to let go of staff whose jobs can be automated and whose labour force would be needed in parts of the labour market that faces shortages.
Pretty much the pitch of this whole thing is “Europe needs to copy America’s lack of labor laws or other regulations”. I wonder if the authors of this fanfic even believe their own spin of other ‘parts of the labor market faces shortage, so firing everyone to put in AI is actually a good thing’ or if it is just a shallow attempt to appease people who find mass layoffs heartless and disruptive.
But Europe has one last card to play. After five years of failing to build a frontier AI sector, it still owns the one bottleneck which the entire race runs through. ASML remains the only company in the world capable of building the EUV lithography equipment that is used to print cutting-edge chips. Without access to its machines, the US could not keep extending its lead in AI; with access to its machines, China would likely have caught up some time ago.
So this scenario correctly acknowledges one of the bottlenecks Europe controls, but then somehow envisions the US being able to strong-arm Europe not to leverage it against them and to cut China out? Have the authors not been paying attention to the US shitting away its soft power (and showing cracks in its hard power with running out of patriot missiles) over the two Trump terms?
Europe’s slide into irrelevance was not inevitable. Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course, had it shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures.
By courage and political will they mean slashing apart labor laws, environmental protections, and other regulations and dumping public money into AI to draw capital investment into Europe. The epilogue is some fantasy bullshit with moon domes made possible by all the American AI advances.
I love the deep lack of specificity in “other sectors of the economy facing shortages”. Either you have to acknowledge that you’re talking about the cafe economy and gig economy and those sectors aren’t so much facing labor shortages as much as leveraging the worker’s chronic underemployment to keep costs down or you’re making shit up wholesale. Also please note that American companies are already finding that as the investor capital subsidies run out it’s often cheaper to hire a person than pay the token costs to do the job with AI.
Zefram Cochrane is supposed to invent warp drive in 2063, these guys need to be moving their timelines forward, not backward!
Everybody remember Frontiers, the publisher that brought us the rat dck pck? Well guess what…
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
When Frontiers started automating the editorial process, I stayed. I reasoned that as long as the automation could be turned off, human editors can still ensure rigorous, high-quality peer review. This now became impossible - the system has been entirely hijacked by algorithms.
Over the last month I saw that human editors are now stripped of control. I could no longer stop the system from auto-inviting “reviewers” with zero relevant expertise. Even worse - the AI began actively revoking the invitations I manually sent out to actual, qualified experts.
I emailed and met with the editorial office to ask for the AI assistant to be turned off. I was told this is not possible. Instead, I was treated to some vague promises of potential future improvements and a dose of gaslighting.
If human editors can’t control who reviews science, it’s no longer peer review — it’s a rubber-stamp machine designed for volume and profit, not quality. I have no intention of attaching my name to it. So I’m out.
https://bsky.app/profile/michael-okun.bsky.social/post/3mnxkxte55s25
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
A predatory slop publisher has turned to algorithmic moderation by clankers? A shocking turn of events, to be sure. They’re probably just trying to wring the last few pennies out of their operation before they meet their inevitable oblivion.
Alamo Drafthouse built a reputation on strict viewing rules to provide a pleasant immersive experience at their theaters.
All of that is gone. They switched to you using your own phone to order food/drink so people are on the phones more often than a regular theater. And now they are doing AI “audience immersive presentations” where the audience remains on their phone to submit prompt garbage to AI generate dumb movies.
Support your local theater. This chain got too much love the last decade. Being in the northeast we only recently got an Alamo but plenty of small local theaters exist in and around the city (brattle, coolidge, west newton all if you are in Boston).
was there an ownership change or something? this is atrocious
Sold to private equity a few years ago and then purchased by Sony most recently
I have some modest proposals for handling private equity but they would all probably count as fedposting. We still haven’t found a decent replacement for the market niche JoAnn fabrics occupied.
The slop startup dubs this “Audience Intelligence” and claims pixar experience. There are two “interactive movies” by them, Pickford AI. No employee there should even consider themselves adjacent to artists.
massive bong rip musk is broadsides-ing the spacex ipo so hard not only because he’s desperate for cash (he is) but also because he wants to stick it to saltman after losing the recent court case
Gary Marcus has been spamming out sneers at Google, OpenAI and Anthropic over the last 24h. He’s right but he’s such a knob about it. The first of his posts was a whopper where he just quoted himself predicting things correctly from like a year ago. It is nice to feel vindicated and say “I told you so” but it’s way too much. It reminds me of Juergen Schmidhuber who was famous on x-twitter for shouting “I ALREADY INVENTED THIS 30 YEARS AGO” every time a new notable paper came out of an AI Lab and whose name became a verb for “claiming credit for something”
He keeps going on about how we will have AGI but it won’t be via transformers. Dude why do we even need or want AGI? He comes so close to being “one of the good guys” and then shows his true colours every single time.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
We need salvation but it won’t come via rapture this decade
It might have come this decade, had they faithfully funded the path of symbolic AI, but instead they wandered around in the desert chasing the false idols of connectionism and deep learning.
Dude why do we even need or want AGI?
To solve biology and physics and live forever amongst the stars, obvs.
Or to allow a tiny elite to treat the rest of humanity like cattle since they no longer depend on them for physical and mental labour.
It’s striking how inimical to life itself the first statement is on its own. The people most obsessed with living for an eternity seem to be having the worst time of it. Yes, the Musks & Thiels are ungodly rich, but do they ever seem even basically well-adjusted? Inordinate wealth seems to come with commensurate insecurity.
Saw a guy watering his lawn this morning. Just standing there, hose in hand, dumping potable water onto grass that exists for no reason other than to be looked at and complained about.
Sir. Do you understand that a single hyperscale data center can drink millions of gallons a year keeping GPUs from cooking themselves while they generate a poem about a sad robot? That water has a HIGHER calling. That water could be evaporating off a cooling tower in service of someone’s RAG pipeline that returns the wrong answer with tremendous confidence.
And here you are. Hydrating Kentucky bluegrass. In a region where the grass was never supposed to grow in the first place.
I asked him if his lawn had an SLA. He said no. I asked what his lawn’s uptime commitment was. He looked at me like I was the unreasonable one. Meanwhile that turf is sitting at four nines of being green and producing exactly zero tokens per second.
We are pouring concrete across three states to host inference workloads, and this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy. No usage-based billing. Not even a freemium tier.
Anyway I reported him to nobody, because there’s no one to report him to, which is honestly the most damning part of this entire ecosystem.
Touch grass, they said. He did. Look where it got us.
NOT EVEN A FREEMIUM TIER. that got me.
this man is allocating municipal water to a crabgrass cluster with no monetization strategy
This is poetry, AI could never
Old: AI Winter
Bold: AI Ragnarok
Botterdamerung
Noice
AI Winter but with the same connotations as a nuclear one
The new Claude model will silently decide whether what you asked it to do is in line with anthropic ToS and silently corrupt your prompt if it doesn’t like what you’re asking. It’s couched as a “safety countermeasure” but it is presumably to stop Chinese labs trying to scrape synthetic data.
We’ve moved from ‘accidental’ hallucinations to deliberate misinformation and you’re paying $$$ for the privelige.
Claude can now be silently nerfed. Anthropic has decided it won’t tell users when this happens.
considering how many habitual llm users can’t tell good from bad output anyway, they always could have done that
To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust
I know this outcome was inevitable after software became a mass market thing, but it’s still rather depressing.
“You’re holding it wrong” as official policy
Wake up babe new genre definition just dropped
https://stoates.substack.com/p/programmer-science-fiction
Includes all the usual suspects, but notably doesn’t mention Ken MacLeod whose Fall Revolution series is probably too socialist[1]. Also avoids discussing Stross post-Singularity Sky.
[1] MacLeod’s Corporation Wars trilogy has immersive VR, artificial conciousness rebelling against authority, and literal p-zombies but is also very anti-fascist, so no wonder it’s not mentioned (also, it’s unfortunately not very good)
So there are a bunch of people on this forum more literary and authorial than I and I welcome any of them to correct me on this, but I’m skeptical of the whole project here of seeking to identify or define a new subgenre that is pushing speculative fiction as a whole forward. It’s always seemed to me like the real creative energy behind this kind of movement doesn’t originate from a defined subgenre as much as from a community of authors in conversation with each other. The identification and labeling comes afterwards as outsiders try to talk about it. In that sense, I don’t think he’s actually identifying that kind of community. Just naming a bunch of writers he likes, to the point of excluding several who he admits would be in this kind of community as defined but he just doesn’t like as much.
It’s been a while since I immersed myself in SF publishing but I think that older terms like “New Wave” and “cyberpunk” were basically marketing terms riding off the hits that spawned them. I believe they were a collaboration between the fandom, magazines and publishers - not in any structured way, but like in music, a term is used to encompass many different acts.
One slubstack does not a genre name, tho. And it’s broad enough to be meaningless. For example one of the first authors is Scott Alexander, who is not formally a programmer, just someone who hangs out online terminally. Vinge was a CS prof, but Banks afaik didn’t have any formal CS training. Ken McLeod worked as a programmer, as did Charles Stross.
SF is a nerd author paradise and nowadays nerds program, so … chicken and egg?
Viral: “read a second book”
Spiral: “read a second Borges story”
The author of “Death and the Compass” and “Emma Zunz” is unrecognizable from the description there.
@gerikson @techtakes Technical nit-pick: “American hard science fiction space opera like Timelike Infinity is also influential”— Timelike Infinity was written by Steven Baxter who is *very* English indeed. Best contextualized as mid-period Interzone generation hitting its imperial phase.
This is a new method of bootlicking: if you as a FLOSS developer don’t use LLMs to fix vulnerabilites identified by LLMs, you’re being unethical
Lol what a weak argument. Not only does this limit your llm use to only bugfixing (which is what the op is limiting their use to right?), it also ignores how a few big recent outages were prob caused by llms. And it treats ethical concerns like some sort of numbers game. We have one ethical concern for and one against so it cancels out.
And it leads to ‘Mengeles experiments were not unethical because some of the torture he did actually provided valuable insights on the extremes a human body can go through’
“It is your moral duty to send as much money as you can to Sam Altman”
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"The instructions say “You are an agent that writes the various article sections for an encyclopedia entry on Joseph Kanuku.”
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“[Note: Britannica is encyclopedia, but instructions say no Britannica. Wait, replace with another.]”
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“Wait, instructions say NEVER cite Wikipedia. Oops. Let me adjust.”
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“The instructions say prioritize peer reviewed, books, etc.”
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“Wait, but instructions say never cite social media, so omit that last part. Wait, adjust. Since Instagram is social media, omit that.”
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“Wait, instructions say avoid “References” as a section, but for completeness, I’ve omitted it from structure.)”
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“The guidelines say “Include any of the following where relevant: - Factual details…” under Missing Information or Knowledge Gaps Examples. And in format, it’s to list only critical issues or all missing info or knowledge gaps.”
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I guess a certain country is using LLMs to try to engage people 1:1 to change their opinions of said country.
Could be a LLM, could be a call-center worker in Kenya or Mumbai or Manilla. Its an old move.
Good point. Now I imagine someone trying to pass the turing test by having their bot pretend to be a sales person.
Anthropic insists that you should use their demon-as-a-service. Hackernews debates the finer points of pentangle construction.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463808
Edit: a hackernews is tired of simonw:
Today we’re launching Claude Fable 5: a Mythos-class model that we’ve made safe for general use.
oh fuck off. going full SCP in their press releases now. insufferable.
Babe wake up, new model that’s too dangerous for public consumption but not really just dropped.
On a related note Mythos has been released and as pointed out, the original “GPT-2 is too dangerous to be released” post was written by Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and Jack Clark, who are all Anthropic’s founders. Same ploy, different model
I’ve also seen mention of “Fable” and I’ve been too sick to go check up on whatever the fuck that is
Mythos with extra safety dust sprinkled on top and they listened to The Safety Dance while writing the system prompt. Also a hand painted sign on the front that says “no chinese were serius”
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
after calling the con about a super hacker AI the “mythos”, now they’re calling the next spiel “fable”? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?
Claude v6.0, “Tall Tale”
Claude v6.1 “Big Fish Story”
They want to invent the AI Named For Untruth from the hit Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Do Not Invent the AI Named for Untruth”.
just taking the piss at this point?
always-have-been.jpg
okay damn you o7 I checked
Claude Fable 5 introduces our 5th model generation for your most ambitious work. Tackle days-long, complex, and asynchronous tasks previous models couldn’t sustain.
folks, can I get a “please god pay us for even more tokens” for 500?
and they listened to The Safety Dance
not sure they’re cool enough even to do that
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
ty! rest is helping, but why are sinuses
remarkably educational, nice
It’s pretty good! The kids want to be influenza for dragoncon lol
It’s on netflix in the states
Let’s all just agree that it’s a beloved RPG game by Lionhead Studios and we’ll leave it at that
lol
Time is a dumb circle
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