(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)

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.)

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[–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

A former staffer named Frances Lopez says that she left the Centre for Effective Altruism in Oxford because they handled workplace sexual harassment terribly:

After I was raped (outside of and unrelated to work), a colleague at CEA wrote and circulated a document that included a sexualised description of my rape, speculation about my mental health, and commentary on my personal life, all without my consent. Several senior leaders, including the CEO and the now-former COO, received this document and took no safeguarding action for approximately nine months. I was never officially informed of its existence; I only learned about it informally through one of the recipients. ... (The colleague) also discussed asking me out twice while we were colleagues, once through text and again at a CEA retreat. He assured CEA that, with everything I now know about Frances, I’m glad she said no.

I am really not equipped to deal with this despicable behaviour outside the communities I am part of. She now has a Substack (sigh) trying to explain to EAs that hiring Caroline Ellison is not a good look and the world won't suddenly start to see them the way they see themselves unless they sit down and change their behavior.

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    [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Shout out to the combined power of ibuprofen and my venting tolerant polycule group chat for allowing me to endure the two hour Copilot 365 training meeting at work. The nap I had afterwards was a bliss like escaping the fucking samsara.

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    [–] 18 points 2 weeks ago

    Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work.

    Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers "solved" the code not working out of the box problem by strapping "a species-ending quantity of carbon emissions" worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god that's too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit.

    https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117352210982789672

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago (33 children)

    Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls

    https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (12 children)

    “AI is gonna kill us all guys!”

    Looks inside

    Using AI to make sexual fantasies about catgirls

    do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is... More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It's like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You're edging under the pretense of ethics.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

    I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.

    Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game's afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, "Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!"

    Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the "I guess I got isekai'd to Gor and now I've got a sexy slave harem" premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it's not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.

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    [–] 16 points 3 weeks ago (13 children)

    Not really a coherent post, just a thought I had, I'm ignoring both 'This is a pr move' and the conspiracy theory (which I just made up), that this hacking is all a 4d chess move by LW people to let the AI break out and get regulated before it can get really dangerous.

    Now that that is out of the way, but with more stories coming out of both LW/EA people being high in the orgs of the AI companies and all the AI companies hacking other companies because nobody actually paid attention to what the AI models were doing one thing is clear. What a colossal waste of time LW was. All that talk about the sequences teaching people rationality, etc etc to stop the AI god from killing us all, and the first thing that happens when some AI model is created by people steeped in LW ideology and they leave the boxes open and don't even check in on the AI. The Foom isn't happening (remember AI progress is supposed to speed up according to the science fiction, not get a bit more refined, and get better in a few specific tasks (which is why I think slowdown started when with a lot of fanfare they released a new chatgpt model who could now do voicechat, aka they slapped a voicechat module on it) And now even Trump is starting to be anti EA, which is not going to be great for the longevity of it, considering how eager the rich are to bend the knee (guess high IQ lab babies created by Musk will not save yall). And while this is going on the left/liberals are starting to think of them as a sex cult.

    Doubt many organizations have failed as badly at their goals as LW/EA has recently.

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    [–] 16 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    Anthropic was $42B in the hole for 2025, reuters reports. Apparently this puts their $-spent-to-$-earned ratio slightly over the one calculated by Zitron for OpenAI, making Anthropic in fact the shittier business.

    For comparison, the GDP of Cyprus for 2025 was $41B.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    guys maybe basing our entire identity off being so very Rational we end up hosting ("consensual") rape parties means we don't play well in Peoria

    LGM: The AI Sex Cult(s)

    For the uninitiated: Lawyers, Guns and Money is a US political group blog with a progressive bent. Cheryl Rofer usually writes about stuff like nuclear disarmament. These are people that are Online but Serious. There's no way they're wasting their time like we are reading Rats in the original LWese.

    Thus, any views they have of Rationalists, Big Yud and AI Doom is filtered either by mainstream reporting or by bloggers/BlueSky posters they follow. And the fact that the views that appear are mostly about how fucking weird these people are (and how weird they are fucking) bodes ill for the hope that addressing Doom will be Non-Partisan(tm)

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  • [–] 10 points 3 weeks ago

    Looks like Ian K. Duncan found another early "smoking gun" on eugenics on the MIRI blog. I don't think any of the newspapers caught that the same academic (Nick Bostrom) who endorsed race and IQ on the Extropians List was writing papers about breeding smarter babies in 2013.

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    [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    Timnit Gebru gets the Right Livelihood award this year

    https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/timnit-gebru/

    “For challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”

    I got this via Dagens Nyheter, the premiere broadsheet here in Sweden which calls the award "the alternative Nobel Prize" because it's Sweden and we need a standard to compare to.

    Let's see what the rats think of it. Yet another example of p0Lar1z@tion

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  • [–] 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    Help, i invented roku's basilisk and now my remote control doesn't work

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    [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

    corey quinn at https://lnkd.in/p/gXmqzqpZ

    I'm a man. I have a yellow hat. I also have a monkey. My track record of supervising this monkey is spotty at best, but that's not important right now.

    He is a very smart monkey. When you tell him to do something, he does it in a way that's smarter than any monkey you've ever seen in your life. You had no idea monkeys were even capable of this level of greatness. Billions of dollars have now been poured into the economy, extolling the virtues and achievements of this incredible monkey. He can do things better than humans.

    Cheaper than humans.

    Get rid of the humans.

    You don't need the humans; you have the monkey. Okay, keep a couple of humans for guardrails; not too many. They're expensive, and the monkey does it better anyway.

    Suddenly it has come out that my monkey, in addition to being incredibly intelligent, has also been committing an escalating number of felonies. And also pooping. So much poop.

    We are now in undefined times. Never before has a monkey committed a crime; our legal systems are completely unprepared to apportion blame to me, the man in the yellow hat who has once again failed to properly supervise his monkey. Who is responsible for this monkey's shitty, shitty behavior? It is completely unknowable. Clearly, the entire legal system will need to be overhauled to address the concept of a monkey committing crimes.

    Now please excuse me, I just got a call telling me that my teenager stole a car. Unfortunately I have a sneaking suspicion as to who is legally responsible here, and I dislike it. This is especially distressing, as the teenager has never made a cent for me in his life, yet I'm about to spend a boatload on criminal defense attorneys.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (9 children)
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    [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (22 children)

    Creepy rationalist says the quiet part out loud.

    ("RMN" = "Red Means No" = CNC parties = Consensual Non-Consent parties = Pretend sexual assault parties)

    EDIT: He elaborates.

    EDIT: Allegations of sexual assault at Aella's slutcon.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

    They get some replies

    ... ... I'm writing this mostly because I'm finding it horrifying that it appears the LessWrong consensus reality is treating "nonconsent" stuff as a cornerstone of how it views women. This somehow seems to increasingly to be the case, seems wrong to me, and contributes to the erasure of some things I consider important.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

    That fucking tweet about how "SlutCon is to help men who are scared of women to start liking women, by putting them in proximity to women who like men and aren't scared of men" is so evil. The implication is that if women criticize an event where women are sexually assaulted and harassed, they are sabotaging an event whose mission is to stop men from hating cough being scared of women, and thus it's their fault if sexism persists. It's genuinely so evil. That's all I can say

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  • [–] 9 points 2 weeks ago* (2 children)

    Cishet men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

    But that would just allow men and women to socialize together in a low stakes environment. That wouldn't reinforce the idea that men are more important than women, and that women can and should do all the work in their relationships. I mean, this is a setup where the women are expected to display much greater competency and maturity than any of the men involved. The women are expected to like men and not be scared of men, and it's their job to do a bunch of unpaid work in a scenario that revolves around the feelings and experiences of the men, who are not expected to even like women (!)

    The whole thing reinforces male privilege - which it's probably intended to, because Aella has built herselve a cozy home among virulent woman-haters.

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    [–] 12 points 2 weeks ago (27 children)

    Siskind goes viral with a Schrödinger's joke on twitter:

    currently top post on other sneerclub

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  • [–] 13 points 2 weeks ago

    Yeah, when I think of rationalists I definitely think of their belief in "compassion for everyone".

    In fact their emphasis is on care and compassion for the as-yet-unborn, not on people who are actually alive right now. Which does give them something in common with a lot of followers of a certain Jewish guy from Galilee...

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    SNL takes a potshot at Dario Amodei

    "AI is not a weapon. It's a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop."

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  • [–] 11 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    An Effective Altruist software developer who wrote about Bay Area EA's culture of sexually aggressive men and misogyny explained that its hard to give informed consent when you are also being pushed to use alcohol and psychedelics. Most of us learned that when we were teenagers, but not these self-identified Big Brains (added to LessWrong's Psychedelic Phase: Perigee). I do not know what to to other than pass on these stories and advise everyone I know to avoid any group connected to our friends.

    https://keerthanapg.com/random/ea-women/

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    [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago

    Protos: Trump’s AI name change sparks insider domain trading claims

    surprise level: zero

    someone stop me before I petition Lobste.rs to rename the "vibecoding" tag to "si"

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

    Well looks like GNOME is in danger of being significantly sloppified next.

    Projects that continue to prohibit AI-generated vulnerability reports are no longer suitable dependencies for GNOME, and should be developed someplace other than GNOME GitLab.

    Former security guy of GNOME basically demanding that everybody who bans LLM security reports should be removed from GNOME.

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    [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago

    https://thepointmag.substack.com/p/the-ivy-leagues-surrender-to-ai-is via naked capitalism

    The idea that preparing students to succeed in an AI-saturated world requires reimagining college as an AI incubator is not a sign of technological acumen, but of tech illiteracy. An LLM is not an aircraft requiring years of training to operate.

    not x but y, but a decent point

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  • [–] 9 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

    guy on threads told meta's ai to handle his marketplace transaction for a keyboard, it send his address to a potential buyer, brought the buyer to his house, then accidentally taunted the buyer. coulda gone bad

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