All participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.

Haven’t seen this skeet posted here. Skeet:

It’s 2050 and a teen girl is torrenting a .tar.gz file of all the consciousnesses of all the tech bros who uploaded themselves into the cloud in a bid for immortality and modding them into The Sims 4

My dad was a bit freaked out by a video version (We're not ready for super-intelligence)of the "AI 2027" paper, particularly finding two end scenarios a bit spooky: colossus-style cooperating AIs taking over the world, and the oligarch concentration of power one, which i think definitely echoed sci-fi he watched/read as a teen.

In case anyone else finds it useful these are the "Comments as I watch it", that I compiled for him

Before watching Video Notes:

• AI Only channel with only 3 videos
• Produced By "80000hours", which is an EA branch (trying to peddle to you the best way to organize 40years * 50 weeks * 40 hours [I love that they assume only 2 weeks of holidays]); which is definitely cult adjacent: https://80000hours.org/about/#what-do-we-do. Mostly appears to be attempting to steer young people to what they believe are "High impact" jobs.

Video Notes:

• The backing paper is a bit of a joke, one "AI 2027", for reference one of the main authors is very much a "cult member", Scott Alexander Siskind, author of "Slate Star Codex" and "Astral Codex Ten".
• Other authors include [AI Futures Project] :
  • Daniel Kokotajlo (podcast co-host of siskind, ex open-ai employee, LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Thomas Larsen (ex MIRI [Machine Intelligence Research Institute = really really culty], LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Eli Lifland (LessWrong/EA regular)
  • Romeo Dean (Astra Fellowship recipient = money for AI Safety research, definitely EA sphere)
• A lot of fluff trying to hype up the credentials of the authors.
• AGI does not have a bounded definition.
• They are playing up the China angle to try and drum up jingoistic support.
• Exaggerating Chat GPT-3 success, by merely citing "users", without mentioning actual revenue, or actual quality.
• Quote:

  How do these things interact, well we don't know but thinking through in detail how it might go is the way to start grappling with that.

  -> I think this epitomises the biggest flaw of their movement, they believe that from "first-principles" it's possible to think hard enough (without needing to confront it to reality) and you can divine the future.-> You can look up "Prediction Markets", which is another of their ontological sins.
• I will note that the prediction of "Agents" was not a hard one, since this is what all this circle wants to achieve, and as the video itself points out it's fantastically incompetent/unreliable.
• Note: This video was made before the release of GPT-5. We don't know precisely how much more compute altogether GPT-5 truly required, but it's very incremental changes compared to GPT-4. I think this philosophy of "More training" is why OpenAI is currently trying (half-succeeding half failing) to raise Trillions of dollars to build out data-centers, my prediction is that the AI bubble bursts before these data centers come to fruition.
• Note: The video assumes keeping models secret, but in reality OpenAI would have a very vested interest in displaying capability, even if not making a model available to the public. Also even on consumer models, OpenAI currently loses a bunch of money for every query.
• Note: The video assumes "Singularitarianism", of ever acceleration in quality of code, and that's why they keep secret models. I think this hits a compute/energy wall in real life, even if you assume that LLMs are actually useful for making "quality" code. These ideas are not new, and these people would raise alarms about it with or without current LLM tech.
• Specific threats of "Bio-weapon", which a priori can not really be achieved without experimentation, and while "automated" labs half exis, they still require a lot of human involvement/resources. Technically grad students could also make deadly bioweapons, but no one is being alarmist about them.
• Note: "Agent 2" Continuous Online learning is gobbledyremoved, that isn't how ML, even today works. At some point there are very diminishing returns, and it's a complete waste of time/energy to continue training a specific model, a qualitative difference would be achieved with a different model. I suspect this sneakily displays "Singularitarianism" dogma.
• Quote:

  Hack into other servers Install a copy of itself Evade detection

  -> This is just science-fiction, in the real world these models require specialized hardware to be run at any effective speed, this would be extremely unlikely to evade detection. Also this treats the model as a single entity with single goals, when in reality any time it's "run" is effectively a new instance.
• Note: This subculture loves the concept of "science in secrecy", which features a lot in the writings of Elizer Yudkowsky. Which is cultish both in keeping their own deeds "in a veil of secrecy", and helpful here when making a prophecy/conspiracy theory, by making the claim hard to disprove specifically (it's happening in secret!)
• Note: Even today Chain-of-thought is not that reliable at explaining why a bot gives a particular answer. It's more analog to guiding "search", rather than true thought as in humans anyway. Them using "Alien-Language" would not be that different.
• Agent 3, magically fast-and-cheap, assuming there are now minimum energy requirements. Then you can magically run 200,000 copies of. magically equivalent to 50,000 humans sped up by 30x. (The magic is "explained" in the paper by big assumptions, and just equating essentially how fast you can talk with the quality of talking, which given the length of their typical blog posts is actually quite funny)
• Note: "Alignment" was the core mission of MIRI/Eliezer Yudkowsky
• Note: Equating Power and Intelligence a lot (not in this video, but in general being suspiciously racist/eugenicist about it), ignoring the material constraints of actual power [echo: Again the epitomical sin of "If you just think hard enough"]
• Note: Also assuming that trillions of dollars of growth can actually happen, simultaneously with millions losing their jobs.
• I am betting that the "There is another" part of the video is probably deliberately echoing Colossus.
• The video casually assumes that the only limits to practical fusion and nanotech just intelligence (instead of potential dead-ends, actually the nanotech part is a particular fancy of theirs, you can lookup "diamondoid bacteria" on LessWrong if you want a laugh)
• The two outcomes at the end of the video are literally robo-heaven and robo-hell, and if you just follow our teachings (in this case slow-downs on AI) you can get to robo-heaven. You will notice they don't imagine/advocate for a future with no massive AI integration into society, they want their robo-heaven.
• Quote:

  None of the experts are disagreeing about a wild future.

  -> I would say specifically some of them are suggesting that AGI soon is implausible quite strongly. I think many would agree that right now the future looks dire with or without super-AI, or even regular AI.

Takeaway section:

Yeah this really is a cult recruitment video essentially.

Last week, we learned that area transphobe Sabine Hossenfelder is using her arXiv-posting privileges to shill Eric Weinstein's bullshit. I have poked around the places where I'd expect to find technical discussion of a physics preprint, and I've come up with nothing. The Stubsack thread, as superficial as it was, has been the most substantive conversation about her post's actual content.

today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech

if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available

New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. [...] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.

• 31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
• 20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
• Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content

And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for "Generative AI" who gets trotted out to say "We want these tools to succeed". No, we don't, you blithering bellend.

Another attempt to platform fascists has cropped up in FOSS, and Drew DeVault's talked all about it. Featuring our good friend Curtis Yarvin.

For something lighter, here's an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest "video game" I've ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn't do it justice):

In lieu of sneering this shit, I'd like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn't matter - give them four years of art so they don't turn out like this guy.

In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:

I will not talk with a chatbot
\ I do not want it while I shop

I do not want it on Windows X-box
\ I do not want it in Firefox

I do not want it in my house
\ I do not want it on my mouse
\ I do not want it here or there
\ I do not want it anywhere.

I do not want AI and Spam
\ I do not want them Sam-Alt-Man

The Framework thread caused by the company's fash turn is still going even after eight full days.

Lotta lowlights to pick from, but the guy openly praising DHH for driving Basecamp straight off a cliff is particularly sneer-worthy:

This is not a sneer so much as a sneer request; anyone know of any good articles written about the total hypocrisy of the Free Speech brigade since the inauguration? By far the most anti-speech environment in decades and most of them are still just whining about pronouns on campus or whatever.

(Yes; FIRE has passed this very basic test and has occasionally switched topics from whining about "leftist professors" to saying stuff like "it's not great that we're deporting people for writing articles for their school paper about how genocide is bad". Literally everyone else is a hypocrite)

Kind of a ramble: So, I’ve been out in the wild recently. I use discord and have noticed that in most of the servers I’m in, either they have an explicit no-genAI policy or quarantined sections where genAI content is allowed. On one podcast’s server, I posted a complaint about some genAI content that was posted to the podcast’s socials, and the embed was removed because it showed the genAI content- 10/10, love to see it. On another server, I figured out that the channel was created specifically because they had a sealion problem but didn’t want to ban their sealion (it appeared to be just one).

An interesting (read: stupid) thing about this sealion was that they are a self-styled leftist that was pro-AI. I won’t try to replicate any of their nonsense here, because A) it was nonsense stemming from a refusal to believe any anti-AI data and a lack of understanding of how LLMs work, and B) I don’t want to look like I’m posting about some kind of argument I had elsewhere here in order to score internet points, as I’m self aware/anxious enough to know that I sound exactly like that right now.

They posted this recent article written by Peter Coffin. There isn’t much about this guy on the internet. All I can gather is that they are some kind of breadtuber or in the breadtube orbit. It’s funny (read: farcical) to see a person posing as leftist say they are “pro-AI” but “anti-AI industry”. Either they don’t understand how the technology works (i.e. ignorant) or are accelerationist, wanting both the destruction of the environment and art (i.e. wilfully stupid)

Anyway, this exploration has shown me that some leftists don’t support copyright protections. I understand that from a couple different perspectives: 1. The main beneficiaries of copyright protections are large media corporations, and 2. it can be interpreted as trying to capitalistically extract fictional value, much like a landlord charging rent. I’m not trying to debunk this (I don’t think I’m representing this well enough). My thought is that I don’t give a shit about corporations losing money, what I care about is the work of individual artists being under/de-valued. Copyrights are an imperfect method that artists use to try seek justice, so it’s a grey area for me. Coffin in the article linked paints the situation as black and white: anyone who tries to stop someone “stealing” is actually rent seeking, whether or not they are a megacorp or a starving artist. (edit) I think this comes from Coffin's "extremely pro-AI" agenda, i.e., being anti-AI is enough to be reductively lumped together under some conspiratorial pro-capitalist agenda.

End of ramble, sorry that there wasn’t much of a point or structure here. Would love to hear any thoughts that come out from reading this.

E: note that this vid is posted as a common criticism of Coffin.

E2: ::: spoiler re: video above: I really didn't know about this before writing that edit. I did some more reading. Coffin is something of a pick-me internet guy, his entire personality crystallised by that video. He's moved from internet trend to internet trend, one of note being gamergate, formerly anti, now pro (yes, as of 2024). He also did rap parodies? Anyway this isn't about him. :::

so a couple months ago it was noted that mattermost’s website had gone very problematic, extreme emphasis on pitching to mil/int with very little indicating its foss roots/nature

and now it seems they’re going for rent extraction even on the self-hosted

The idea that AI will be a boon for searching the mathematical literature is undermined somewhat by how it shits the bed there too.

Trump freed Binance fraudster, SBF pardon futures mooning rn

look at the depth of this grifting

a whole One (1!) H100! in space!

note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!

compute! in space! "what do you mean 'compute what'? compute!" I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it'll run Gemma![0] magic!

SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.

scan-time "inference", like you'd definitely know every parameter you'd want to query and every result you'd want to have, first-time, at scan! there's a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.

and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that's before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list

good god.

I guess the one good bit here is that it isn't the "we're gonna micromachine them in orbit!" bullshit fantasy, but I bet that's not far behind

[0] - "multimodal and wide language support" so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs... input... and... response... which again goes back to all those pesky "interaction" and "network" and "storage" questions.

NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question

I often use LLMs to help me understand concepts and draft my writing. Can I use LLMs during the review process?

And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.

You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process.

"Yeah, go ahead, ask 'Grok is this true', but pretty please don't use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time."

Please remember that you are responsible for the quality and accuracy of your submitted review regardless of any tools, resources, or other help you used to construct the final review.

"Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly."

Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits....

New paper on LLMs just dropped, titled LLMs Can Get "Brain Rot"!

Currently a novelty at this point, but could prove useful to make the likes of Iocaine and Nepenthes more effective - especially since the paper notes:

the damage is multifaceted in changing the reasoning patterns and is persistent against large-scale post-hoc tuning.

It does also suggest doing some actual quality control to prevent damage to the LLMs, but that sure ain't happening

A question from ejwillingham:

Google seems to have turned off the -ai in search on iPhone (Safari browser)and overrides it to return an AI-generated result now. Anyone got a fucking workaround on this bc I do not want to see that shit

https://xcancel.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1980035057067884670

hmm yes, this will surely replace wikipedia.

Guys, it's a problem that GenPop thinks "AI" is useless, because that means they will deny the inevitable coming existence of the Evil Robot God and make it harder to stop it

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/W2dTrfTsGtFiwG5hM/origins-and-dangers-of-future-ai-capability-denial

The whole thing has to be read to be believed. But there are some fun nuggets:

• saying that an evil robot god is coming is Rational. Doubting that is a conspiracy theory
• slagging flat-earthers on LW is truly the pot calling the kettle black
• "I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or detect cancer. In that case, I think it's a lot harder to deny its achievements. But in our world, a lot of AI's greatest achievements take context to understand, like protein folding or playing board games." - yeah sure buddy all the pro board game players are quaking in their boots

New Baldur Bjarnason: The inevitability of anger, on the impending reckoning for AI and tech influencers' attempts to avoid it, plus how social media shapes public discourse.

So anybody else noticing regular outages here today or was it just me?

Should an AI copy of you help decide if you live or die? - Arstechnica.com

AI ""copy""

noticed someone like "comments are lazy! never use them! write better code!"

A:

• I'm paid for doing the job, I'm not paid to be not lazy.
• comments are fucking useful

Watched a debate between Emily M. Bender and Sébastien Bubeck --- an OpenAI researcher --- from March. As usual, Dr. Bender fucking rules. Bubeck struck me as an idiot and kind of an ass.

Simon Willison writes a fawning blog post about the new "Claude skills" (which are basically files with additional instructions for specific tasks for the bot to use)

How does he decide to demonstrate these awesome new capabilities?

By making a completely trash, seizure inducing GIF...

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

He even admits it's garbage. How do you even get to the point that you think that's something you want to advertise? Even the big slop monger companies manage to cherry pick their demos.

Just felt like I got an aneurysm there.

(in unrelated things, first)

JFC some CSAM collector stormed a Wikipedia conference with a gun https://slate.com/technology/2025/10/wikipedia-editors-conference-gunman-culture-war.html

Everything about this is terrible:

Crypto scammer reported to ICE after stealing cancer patient’s treatment fund

Oh boy, another AI doom video popped up on my feed. Time for more morbid curiosity. The topic is about Big Yud and Nate Soares's new book ("If You Build It, Everyone Dies") about how AI is gonna kill us all. I have better things to waste 30 minutes on, so I'm not watching the full video, but the thumbnail ("The 7 Minute War") kinda suggests what the contents are gonna be.

Thankfully, the description of the video has a Google doc with their sources! I'm sure it's full of hard evidence from careful experiments that logically demonstrate why their doomsday scenario is something to worry about, not just a random assortment of Anthropic blog posts and completely unrelated events.

Somehow, there are a bunch of sources for the first 2 minutes of the video.

"In the New York Times' best-selling book, which was endorsed by Nobel laureates and the godfathers of AI" Geoffrey Hinton — Personal estimate >50% existential risk.

Geoffrey "All radiologists will be replaced in 5 years" Hinton, Nobel laureate in physics, famous for his work in ... physics.

"researchers from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute describe in detail one potential example future" Machine Intelligence Research Institute — The Sable scenario from If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Yudkowsky & Soares. Fictional narrative illustrating risks, not prediction.

This is not the first we've seen from MIRI, and I have a feeling it will not be the last. The monster under my bed is a fictional narrative illustrating risks, not prediction.

"AI researchers have known this has been potentially a very bad idea since at least 2024" Anthropic/Apollo Research — Multiple 2024 papers document deceptive/self-preserving behaviors in controlled evaluations.

They are still trying to flog the Anthropic/Apollo Research claims that chatbots will lie to you if you tell them to lie to you.

"They spin up 200,000 GPUs and let Sable think for 16 hours straight" xAI/NVIDIA — Colossus supercomputer in Memphis scaling toward ~200,000 GPUs for Grok training.

What does this even demonstrate? Some people can do some stuff with some GPUs? I ate some oatmeal today. Now everyone should be thoroughly convinced of my oatmeal-eating abilities.

I watched for a few seconds around the timestamp, and it seems to be the beginning of their scifi story, I mean, AGI scenario. Yes, if you want to convince people that your scenario is plausible, I'm sure this is the part that you need serious amounts of evidence for. Remember, almost half the sources have timestamps for the first two minutes of the video.

"a stunt to see if Sable can crack famous math problems like the Riemann hypothesis" Clay Mathematics Institute — Riemann Hypothesis remains unsolved after 160+ years, considered most famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics.

Again, what does this demonstrate? I tried solving P vs NP with a cheeseburger. That didn't work either. The only purpose of mentioning this is for narrative window dressing, because Math Is For Smart People.

These are the sources for just the first two minutes. After that, they get a bit sparse.

"Back in 2024, smaller models showed flashes of the same behavior" Multiple Papers — Documented deception/scheming findings in frontier models.

"Claude 3.7 was caught repeatedly cheating on coding tasks even when told to stop"

More Anthropic blog posts and system cards? Come on, I can't sneer the same thing twice in one post!

"Steal cryptocurrency from weak exchanges just like hackers did to Mt. Gox in 2011" U.S. Department of Justice — Russian nationals charged for 2011 Mt. Gox hack. 647,000-850,000 BTC stolen.

I don't know what this has to do with supporting the validity of their AI doomsday scenario, but kudos to them for showing why cryptocurrency is also stupid, I guess.

"or Bybit in 2025" Reuters/FBI — Largest cryptocurrency theft to date. FBI attributed to North Korean Lazarus Group.

More? I guess this is hard evidence for showing why cryptocurrency is stupid. I still don't understand how this demonstrates that AI is scary.

"Reminder, this scenario is based on years of technical research by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, laid out in the book If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies" MIRI — Meta-commentary explaining the scenario is illustrative, not predictive.

I knew MIRI would be back. It's illustrative, not predictive! Please don't blame us if none of this even remotely happens! But it's based on years of technical research. An entire graduate student's worth of output in a decade.

"In 2023, a human gave an LLM access to the internet and created an X account, Terminal of Truths, which gained hundreds of thousands of followers and launched its own crypto meme coin that reached a literal billion dollar market cap" Terminal of Truths — Real-world example of AI agent gaining social media following and wealth.

The link they give references ... another one of their own videos. You really are not beating the circular reference allegations here. Even if the purported story is somehow accurate, this again demonstrates how cryptocurrency is stupid. At least they use an LLM as a prop this time.

"Gain of function research. Any one of them could be hijacked to unleash catastrophe." Science/CIDRAP — Fouchier and Kawaoka created ferret-transmissible H5N1. Controversial GOF research began 2011.

I think Yud is obsessed with this topic in particular. Better than diamondoid bacteria, I guess. Again, the AI just magically comes in and uses this stuff somehow.

"The number one and number two most cited living scientists across all fields think scenarios like this are not only possible but likely to happen. And the average AI researcher thinks there is a 16% chance of AI causing human extinction."

Okay, let me be completely serious for this one. What would someone do if they truly believed that their work would lead to a horrible disaster, such as the extinction of humanity? Would they continue to work in the field, let alone make enough contributions to rise to the top? Alright I'm done.

A second teardown of Omarchy has hit the web

https://eepy.moe/notes/ae7rhgxvpw8d09kw

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Dont know the exact details, but there now is a fork from the popular doom engine gzDoom called, UZDoom, because the initial dev came out retirement out of nowhere and started to vibe code, causing all the others to quit.

More here https://zdoom.org/news#p80996

Crypto Investor Proposes 450-Foot Statue of Greek God on Alcatraz Island is a story making the rounds in the press lately and aaaaaah I hate it. I'd say something more coherent than that but it's already given me quite a headache.

He has a personal website as well as a website for his stupid statue idea. Both of which are buggy / ugly -- apparently after saving $450 million for a dumb statue he has none left for good website coding.