Not only are they grade-school level awful, he totally misses the point of the original

https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/diffusion/imagen/2026-02-13-gwern-chatgpt-gemini3propreview-kimik2thinking-meme-tomgauldourblessedhomelandtheirbarbarouswastes-toolsforthoughtzettlekastenvsprocrastination.jpg

My God, it's like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There's a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it's capped at "shit".

Why does the kitchen in the "zen of instant coffee" strip have two stoves?

Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.

It is also an incredible strength that they actually practice what they preach, and don't exclude someone based on hearsay and "probably a rapist".

🫪

Yeah lesswrong is weird about China. Its an ongoing thing. It alternates between fear (that China won't appreciate the risk of making AI Satan or will beat the US to making AI God) and occasional hope (that they might manage to "safety-pill" China and China will find the magic formula to AI alignment). I pulled together some posts previously here: https://awful.systems/post/4103825

I know this is not a novel insight, but all these people in the comments talking about translating HPMOR into as many languages as possible and funding efforts to spread it all over the world... it's bog-standard cult behavior. Substitute "Watchtower magazine" or "Dianetics" for HPMOR to make it even more obvious.

The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:

When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.

Goddamn it, people

It continues

the HPMOR comic

No no no no

Had someone tell me that they could use the method they use to make these games to make superintelligence, despite the fact that trying this with AI models would be wildly different than doing it with games, and also trying to combine every single AI model into one with this would absolutely obliterate your computer

Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.

let's continue with the HP theme

One of the most underexplored aspects of Harry Potter's worldbuilding is the color of Lucius Malfoy's hair.

Jreg also did a video with Aella a couple years back which was an interesting surprise. More recently he was on some Lighthaven podcast. He does a lot of weird things though so idk

q: on the implementation - Is this basically "torturing" the LLM by prompting it with "you are being tortured, lol' in a system prompt?

manifesto: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers

If you called this a schizopost, Jreg would proudly agree with you. Especially the entire "You Are Autistic" section where he invents new and insane flavours of ableism, then proudly declares himself a schizophrenic, for the purpose of hating AI more.

What Would You Do If Your Employer Could Destroy the World

Surely not things you can print in the newspaper. Surely.

Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.

people forget that there are areas in russia, not very far away from there, where plague is endemic in wild rodents

More to the point, plague is treable by a dozen antibiotics

and even if it weren't it is well out of the Twilight Zone that COVID was in where large chunks of the population are at low enough risk from it that they can't be arsed to do anything about it, instead it's in the Smallpox Leagues where you bring the hammer down wherever you see it.

Like it or not, we programmers, like painters before us, are slowly going to disappear. AI, like the camera, completely changed the game. You can sulk about it, or you can pick up a camera, start learning, and become a photographer.

Thinking that photography is just super advanced painting (and that there are no more painters??) shows a lack of understanding of either. But this is an AI-huffer, so I repeat myself.

If I'm no longer writing the code, what exactly am I doing? If you ponder that question, let me ask you another one: Do civil engineers do engineering?

My mom is a civil engineer. I have tons of memories of her at her giant drawing table with rice paper, rulers, pens, and razor blades, designing people's homes. With her pen she dug trenches, laid rebar, set walls, and picked the type of concrete to use without ever picking up a shovel. She was doing engineering. She was solving hard problems with hard constraints. The fact that someone else picked up a shovel, cut the rebar, set up molds, and poured the concrete doesn't take that away from her.

You literally just described engineering! Construction is a completely different job!

With the agents pouring concrete, we can now focus on the thing as a whole.

This is such a dumb take because it's wrong in both directions.

Either LLMs are really bad and shouldn't be trusted to write code and by trusting them you're going to utterly fail. Or LLMs are actually good enough to write code, but then they'll also be good enough to design/architect anything you could and reduce your labor's value to zero (e.g. someone will create a harness that lets the business guys TRULY prompt whatever they want into existence). The only situation where this works out for labor is if LLMs end up frozen in some middle ground where they don't get any more capable.

This idea that the LLM is analogous to a camera is such an insipid, thought-terminating cliché.