Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

Saw this, was going to post this a literal minute before you did but stared into this abyss a little too long.

Here's what the abyss revealed:

• Guy is fucking stupid
• Guy is fucking stupid, hence the AI use
• Guy is fucking stupid, AI accidentally his whole database and he is still an AI glazer

Can't wait to see this guy just use a different but same tool to delete his shit again, and learn nothing

their story is so incoherent, i can't even tell if there was a database to begin with

I'd be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn't hilarious.

"I panicked and ran database commands without permission."

"I destroyed all production data."

"You immediately said 'No', ''Stop', 'You didn't even ask.'"

"But it was already too late."

also great: the promptfondlers unrapidly rediscovering why source control management exists and is desired

I'm kind of half looking forward to every soda being sweetened with aspartame or acesulfame potassium, so I can finally quit drinking them. Perhaps blue food might indirectly help people like me eat healthier for a while. Thanks, torment nexus.

This result has me flummoxed frankly. I was expecting Google to get a gold medal this year since last year they won a silver and were a point away from gold. In fact, Google did announce after OAI that they had won gold.

But the OAI claim is that they have some secret sauce that allowed a “pure” llm to win gold and that the approach is totally generic- no search or tools like verifiers required. Big if true but ofc no one else is allowed to gaze at the mystery machine. It is hard for me to take them seriously given their sketchy history, yet the claim as stated has me shooketh.

Also funny aside, the guy who lead the project was poached by the zucc. So he’s walking out the front door with the crown jewels lmaou.

Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl

truth in advertising: they're hinting what the music will sound like

Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.

Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.

I expect the time right around when the first ASI gets built to be chaotic, unstable, and scary

Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.

If anyone else is wondering: DSP here I think stands for "Delivery Service Partner", and driver for someone driving a vehicle. (I assumed the context "Digital Signal Processing" and driver as in "device driver" at first and was quite confused :P)

On-topic: I think regulation needs to come down hard on the delivery industry in general, be it parcels or food or whatever, working conditions there have been terrible for a long time.

As a worker in the semiconductor space, I suddenly feel the urge to write a 100k word blog post about how a preemptive strike against LW is both necessary and morally correct.

For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.

"If the AI God doesn't kill you, we will." is one hell of a sales pitch.

Suppose further that enough powerful people are concerned about the poverty in Ireland, anti-catholic discrimination, food insecurity, and/or loss of rental revenue, that there's significant political will to Do Something. Should we ban starvation? Should we decolonise? Should we export their produce harder to finally starve Ireland? Should we sign some kind of treaty? Should we have a national megaproject to replace the population with the British? Many of these options are seriously considered.

Enter the baseline option: Let the Irish sell their babies as a delicacy.

The sanctions and inspections idea is so silly esp after what the USA/Trump did to Iran. (I mean the deciding that Iran wasnt keeping their end of the bargain and still making Uranium. So after the end Iran started to make more Uranium for real. Gg everyone).

Also 'cull the gpus': [angry gamer noises]

Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don’t roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.

Ah, yes, artificially kneecap chip fabs' yields, I'm sure that will go over well with the capitalist overlords who own them

I'm not gonna advocate for it to happen but I'm pretty sure the world would be overall in a much healthier place geopolitically if someone actually started yeeting missiles into major American cities and landmarks. It's too easy to not really understand the human impact of even a successful precision strike when the last times you were meaningfully on the other end of the airstrike were ~20 and ~80 years ago, respectively.

The whole internet loves Éspèrature Trouvement, the grumpy old racist! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the racist is not that old and actually has a pretty normal name. Also don't look up his runescape username.

Fucking hell. Not the most important part of the story, but his elaborate lies about being Jewish are very very weird. Kind of like white Americans pretending that they're Cherokee I guess?

also here https://awful.systems/post/4995759

The long and short of it is motherjones discovered TPOs openly nazi alt.

Hmm, should I be more worried and outraged about genocides that are happening at this very moment, or some imaginary scifi scenario dreamed up by people who really like drawing charts?

One of the ways the rationalists try to rebut this is through the idiotic dust specks argument. Deep down, they want to smuggle in the argument that their fanciful scenarios are actually far more important than real life issues, because what if their scenarios are just so bad that their weight overcomes the low probability that they occur?

(I don't know much philosophy, so I am curious about philosophical counterarguments to this. Mathematically, I can say that the more they add scifi nonsense to their scenarios, the more that reduces the probability that they occur.)

Recently, I've realized that there is a decent explanation for why so many people believe that - if we model them as operating under a strict zero-sum game model of the world… ‘everyone loses’ is basically an incoherent statement - as a best approximation it would either denote no change and therefore be morally neutral, or an equal outcome, and would therefore be preferable to some.

Yes, this is why people think that. This is a normal thought to think others have.

Iirc Galloway was a pro cryptocurrency guy. So this tracks

E: imagine if the 3d printer people had the hype machine behind them like this. 'China better watch out, soon all manufacturing of products will be done by people at home'. Meanwhile China: [Laughs in 大跃进].

After understanding a lot of things it’s clear that it didn’t. And it fooled me for two weeks.

I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.

qu1j0t3 replies:

that's, uh, not really the ideal takeaway from this lesson

you have to scroll through the person's comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros

it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel we've all come to know and despise remains unknown

they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can "work in the background" on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestacey's other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed

looks like there's either downvote brigade keeping critical comments at +1 or 0, or reddit brigading countermeasures went on in defense of wittle promprfondler

Oof, that Hollywood guest (Brian Koppelman) is a dunderhead. "These AI layoffs actually make sense because of complexity theory". "You gotta take Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously. He predicted everything perfectly."

I looked up his background, and it turns out he's the guy behind the TV show "Billions". That immediately made him make sense to me. The show attempts to lionize billionaires and is ultimately undermined not just by its offensive premise but by the world's most block-headed and cringe-inducing dialog.

Terrible choice of guest, Ed.

My favorite static site generator, Marmite, is now making Special Accomodations for AI bros by making a context file? The dev is also making all of his PRs with Claude.

Anyone have any recommendations for replacements?

It's extremely annoying everywhere. GitHub's updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.

For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? It's amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only bother's to tell me about their revolutionary features of "please spam me with useless PRs" and... make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?

rsyslog goes “AI first”

what

Thanks for the "from now on stay away from this forever" warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal ("how AI is shaping the future of logging"), I have to remind myself it's a syslog daemon.

Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source

Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I'm not sure it can recover from.

the announcement post is obviously LLM-generated as well

thescream.tiff

The big shift in per-action cost is what always seems to be missing from the conversation. Like, in a lot of my experience the per-request cost is basically negligible compared to the overhead of running the service in general. With LLMs not only do we see massive increases in overhead costs due to the training process necessary to build a usable model, each request that gets sent has a higher cost. This changes the scaling logic in ways that don't appear to be getting priced in or planned for in discussions of the glorious AI technocapital future

I've done some of the numbers here, but don't stand by them enough to share. I do estimate that products like Cursor or Claude are being sold at roughly an 80-90% discount compared to what's sustainable, which is roughly in line with what Zitron has been saying, but it's not precise enough for serious predictions.

Your last paragraph makes me think. We often idealize blockchains with VMs, e.g. Ethereum, as a global distributed computer, if the computer were an old Raspberry Pi. But it is Byzantine distributed; the (IMO excessive) cost goes towards establishing a useful property. If I pick another old computer with a useful property, like a radiation-hardened chipset comparable to a Gamecube or G3 Mac, then we have a spectrum of computers to think about. One end of the spectrum is fast, one end is cheap, one end is Byzantine, one end is rad-hardened, etc. Even GPUs are part of this; they're not that fast, but can act in parallel over very wide data. In remarkably stark contrast, the cost of Transformers on GPUs doesn't actually go towards any useful property! Anything Transformers can do, a cheaper more specialized algorithm could have also done.

@TinyTimmyTokyo He has more dollars than sense, as they say. (Funnier if you say it out loud)
@blakestacey

My guess is that vibe-physics involves bruteforcing a problem until you find a solution. That method sorta works, but is wholly inefficient and rarely robust/general enough to be useful.

While I also fully expect the conclusion to check out, it's also worth acknowledging that the actual goal for these systems isn't to supplement skilled developers who can operate effectively without them, it's to replace those developers either with the LLM tools themselves or with cheaper and worse developers who rely on the LLM tools more.

When you look at METR's web site and review the credentials of its staff, you find that almost none of them has any sort of academic research background. No doctorates as far as I can tell, and lots of rationalist junk affiliations.

oh yeah that was obvious when you see who they are and what they do. also, one of the large opensource projects was the lesswrong site lololol

i'm surprised it's as well constructed a study as it is even given that

using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them

We live in a world where the US vice president admits to reading siskind AI fan fiction, so that ship has probably sailed.

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

This really gets on my nerves too. They probably came up with the idea that they could increase time spent on their platforms and thus revenue by providing more content in their users' native languages (especially non-English). Simply forcing it on everyone, without giving their users a choice, was probably the cheapest way to implement it. Even if this annoys most of their user base, it makes their investors happy, I guess, at least over the short term. If this bubble has shown us anything, it is that investors hardly care whether a feature is desirable from the users' point of view or not.

Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as “Bleib für immer am Leben”, guess they named it “Stay Forever Live”? No way to know for sure, of course.

From Reddit

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shit^tm and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.

btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.

I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.

Ah, im not the only one, yes very annoying. I wonder if there isn't also a setting they can ask the browsers about the users preferred language usage. Like how you can change languages on a windows install and some installers/etc follow that preferred language.

An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions

aliexpress did that since forever but you can just set display language once and you're done. these ai-dubs are probably worst so far but can be turned off by uploader (it's opt-out) (for now)

Good news for women, less risk of the pool needing to be drained because someone crapped in it again.

hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool

Can’t remove them if they were never in it.

hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.

Wasn't the "problem" that there's too many men in the mating pool and women are "alphamaxxing" or whatever the fuck to get the highest quality dick? Shouldn't this be a good thing for incels like Hanania.

mating pool

probably on par with the other stuff you might see at a rationalist poly compound

Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably won't be filling those positions any time soon.

As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.

Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the "AI" into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.

Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.

We—yes, even you—are using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already

Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between "LLMs" and "machine learning", but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.

I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.

I've always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I'm the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he's saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that's just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.

Those opening Peter Thiel quotes... Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.

I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.

I'm not comfortable saying that consciousness and subjectivity can't in principle be created in a computer, but I think one element of what this whole debate exposes is that we have basically no idea what actions makes consciousness happen or how to define and identify that happening. Chatbots have always challenged the Turing test because they showcase how much we tend to project consciousness into anything that vaguely looks like it (interesting parallel to ancient mythologies explaining the whole world through stories about magic people). The current state of the art still fails at basic coherence over shockingly small amounts of time and complexity, and even when it holds together it shows a complete lack of context and comprehension. It's clear that complete-the-sentence style pattern recognition and reproduction can be done impressively well in a computer and that it can get you farther than I would have thought in language processing, at least imitatively. But it's equally clear that there's something more there and just scaling up your pattern-maximizer isn't going to replicate it.