Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025

That thread gives me hope. A decade ago, a random internet discussion in which rationalist came up would probably mention "quirky Harry Potter fanfiction" with mixed reviews, whereas all the top comments on that thread are calling out the alt-right pipeline and the racism.

Urgh, I couldn't even get through the whole article, it's too disgusting. What a surprise that yet another "no politics at work"-guy turns out to support fascism!

just yesterday I saw this toot and now I know why

(I mean, they probably should’ve bounced the guy a decade ago, but definitely even more time for it now)

@mawhrin just casually pitching “great replacement theory” there. What a little Nazi

I was in London last week and I can confirm it still has the Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and streets. The Tube is as shite and loud and warm and tight as ever. I even got called a cunt once. Had a blast. On a scale of Bordeaux to Beans on Toast I rank it 9/10 Britishness

@mawhrin @BlueMonday1984 bad news, he's just financed a coup of Rubygems…

(well, shopify did. he's on the board. so, looks like, best guess.)

(edit: fixed wrong company name.)

This is an interesting crystallization that parallels a lot of thoughts I've been having, and it's particularly hopeful that it seeks to discard the "hacker" moniker and instead specifically describe the subjects as programmers. Looking back, I was only becoming terminally online circa 1997, and back then it seemed like there was an across-the-spectrum effort to reclaim the term "hacker" into a positive connotation after the federal prosecutions of the early 90s. People from aspirant-executive types like Paul Graham to dirty hippies like RMS were insistent that being a "hacker" was a good thing, maybe the best possible thing. This was, of course, a dead letter as soon as Facebook set up at "One Hacker Way" in Menlo Park, but I'd say it's definitely for the best to finally put a solid tombstone on top of that cultural impulse.

As well, because my understanding of the defining activity of the positive-good "hacker" is that it's all too close to Zuckerberg's "move fast and break things," and I think Jared White would probably agree with me. Paul Graham was willing to embrace the term because he was used to the interactive development style of Lisp environments, but the mainstream tools have only fitfully evolved in that direction at best. When "hacking," the "hacker" makes a series of short, small iterations with a mostly nebulous goal in mind, and the bulk of the effort may actually be what's invested in the minimum viable product. The self-conception inherits from geek culture a slumped posture of almost permanent insufficiency, perhaps hiding a Straussian victimhood complex to justify maintaining one's own otherness.

In mentioning Jobs, the piece gestures towards the important cultural distinction that I still think is underexamined. If we're going to reclaim and rehabilitate even homeopathic amounts of Jobs' reputation, the thesis we're trying to get at is that his conception of computers as human tools is directly at odds with the AI promoters' (and, more broadly, most cloud vendors') conception of computers as separate entities. The development of generative AI is only loosely connected with the sanitized smiley-face conception of "hacking." The sheer amount of resources and time spent on training foreclose the possibility of a rapid development loop, and you're still not guaranteed viable output at the end. Your "hacks" can devolve into a complete mess, and at eye-watering expense.

I went and skimmed Graham's Hackers and Painters again to see if I could find any choice quotes along these lines, since he spends that entire essay overdosing on the virtuosity of the "hacker." And hoo boy:

Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do, designing beautiful software, would be much more difficult. You need a good sense of design to judge good design. And there is no correlation, except possibly a negative one, between people's ability to recognize good design and their confidence that they can.

You think Graham will ever realize that we're culminating a generation of his precious "hackers" who ultimately failed at all this?

AFAIK the USA is the only country where programmers make very high wages compared to other college-educated people in a profession anyone can enter. Its a myth that so-called STEM majors earn much more than others, although people with a professional degree often launch their careers quicker than people without (but if you really want to launch your career quickly, learn a trade or work in an extractive industry somewhere remote). So I think for a long time programmers in the USA made peace with FAANG because they got a share of the booty.

Hackers is dead. (Apologies to punk)

Id say that for one reason alone, when Musk claimed grok was from the guide nobody really turned on him.

Unrelated to programmers or hackers, Elons father (CW: racism) went fully mask off and claims Elon agrees with him. Which considering his promotion of the UK racists does not feel off the mark. (And he is spreading the dumb '[Africans] have an [average] IQ of 63' shit, and claims it is all genetic. Sure man, the average African needs help understanding the business end of a hammer. As I said before, guess I met the smartest Africans in the world then, as my university had a few smart exchange students from an African country. If you look at his statements it is even dumber than normal, as he says population, so that means either non-Black Africans are not included, showing just how much he thinks of himself as the other, or they are, and the Black African average is even lower).

Huh, I wonder who this Krauss guy is, haven't heard of him.

open wikipedia

entire subsection titled "Allegations of sexual misconduct"

close wikipedia

All of those people, Krauss, Dawkins, Harris (okay that one might've been unsalvageable from the start, I'm really not sure) are such a great reminder that you can be however smart/educated you want, the moment you believe you're the smartest boi and stop learning and critically approaching your own output you get sucked into the black hole of your asshole, never to return.

Like if I had a nickel. It's hubris every time. All of those people need just a single good friend that, from time to time, would tell them "man, what you said was really fucking stupid just now" and they'd be saved.

Clout is a proxy of power and power just absolutely rots your fucking brain. Every time a Guy emerges, becomes popular, clearly thinks "haha, but I am different, power will not rot MY brain", five years later boom, he's drinking with Jordan Benzo Peterson. Even Joe Fucking Rogan used to be significantly more lucid before someone gave him ten bazillion dollars for a podcast and he suffered severe clout poisoning.

Side note: The way I've seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I've mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.

The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.

My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.

Slightly related to the 'it is an op' thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.

The commentator who thinks that USD 120k / year is a poor income for someone with a PhD makes me sad. That is what you earn if you become a professor of physics at a research university or get a good postdoc, but she aged out of all of those jobs and was stuck on poorly paid short-term contracts. There are lots of well-paid things that someone with a PhD in physics can do if she is willing to network and work for it, but she chose "rogue intellectual."

A German term to look up is WissZeitVG but many academic jobs in many countries are only offered to people no more than x years after receiving their PhD (yep, this discriminates against women and the disabled and those with sick spouses or parents).

(sees YouTube video)

I ain't [watchin] all that

I'm happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

Sorry but who the fuck is that? Not one of our common guests here, I need a primer on her

thanks for linking this, was fun to watch

hadn't seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it's a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are

and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner

@PMMeYourJerkyRecipes @BlueMonday1984

The guy from the Federalist doesn’t want more ideological diversity in academia, he wants less. But he’ll settle for more as an interim goal until he can purge the wrong-thinkers.

The case for affirmative action for conservatives

We have that already it’s called business school

Forgive my stupidity, but I don't know what this means. Or it's referencing something I don't know.

TIL Hank Green, the milquetoast BlueSky poster, also has some YouTube channel. How quaint.

I think every time I learn That Guy From BlueSky also has some other gig different from posting silly memes I lose some respect for them.

E.g. I thought Mark Cuban was just a dumb libertarian shitposter, but then it turned out he has a cuntillion dollars and also participated in a show unironically called "Shark Tank" that I still don't 100% believe was a real thing because by god

What's up with all the websites that tell me "you've reached the limit of free articles for the month" even though I've literally never entered that site before in my life. Stop gaslighting me you cunts.

Anyway, here's the archive

I mean if it gets too hot he could try the traditional fiber arts dodge for internet hate and fake his own death.

Is there already a word for "an industry which has removed itself from reality and will collapse when the public's suspension of disbelief fades away"?

Calling this just "a bubble" doesn't cut it anymore, they're just peddling sci-fi ideas now. (Metaverse was a bubble, and it was stupid as hell, but at least those headsets and the legless avatars existed.)

It’s a financial security threat, you see

linkedin thotleedir posts directly into your mailbox? gonna have to pour one out for you

AI’s Biggest Security Threat May Be Quantum Decryption

an absolutely wild grab-bag of words. the more you know about each piece, the more surreal the sentence becomes. unintentional art!

Naturally, the best and most obvious fix — don’t hoard all that shit in the first place — wasn’t suggested.

At this point, I'm gonna chalk the refusal to stop hoarding up to ideology more than anything else. The tech industry clearly sees data not as information to be taken sparingly, used carefully, and deleted when necessary, but as Objective Reality Units^tm which are theirs to steal and theirs alone.

Cultish and Magical Overthinking are top shelf.

Having followed PLT stuff online for more than a quarter century now, I can state with confidence that basically everyone writing about lambda calculus online is doing it to glorify themselves.

Well, I'll give them the text equivalent of a "you tried" sticker for finally admitting their automatic bullshit machines produce (gasp) bullshit, but the main sneerable thing I see is the ISO Standard OpenAI Anthropomo-

the developers actively selected for bullshit generation

every_tf2_class_laughing_at_once.wav

(Maximising lies extruded per ocean boiled was definitely what they were going for in hindsight, but it geniunely cracks me up to see them come out and just say it)

it's a shitty paper but even they couldn't avoid the point forever

Pretty sure that's a strawman.

I guess keeping in theme, "vibe replying"

I think "making up a guy to get mad at" is already an idiom as is.

it's kinda hilarious how close "steelmanning" (as practiced by some) already is to this, but probably not far enough to be usable for that purpose on its own

death will be defeated as long as it stands in the way of profits (man i fucking hate it there)

Nah, its completely on-topic - "bad tech hurting people" has become a major theme of our current times, a bad glucose monitor hurting diabetics is completely expected

“Why didn’t Iain take my neuroses into account??”

Yes, why didn't he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.

Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don't feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.

Edit:

But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading. And it’s not so clear to me that the Culture is all it is cracked up to be.

This isn't oppositional reading. This is an often discussed thing in the novels. So much so that the novels have counterarguments for a lot of the regular 'the culture is bad' arguments.

Anyway the article is so bad I wonder how well this person can read.

Edit part 2, can't let things go shouting electronic booo:

Sociopaths

They mention that sociopaths either get a 24/7 drone on them to guard them if they do crimes (more a general criminal thing) or if they are more megalomanic sociopaths they get to run out their desires in a virtual world (Which I assume runs a lot like the modern game Rust, where a subset of the playerbase seems to love to make 14 year old boys cry, going from the yt vids I saw). If this isn't enough, they will need to convince a Mind to help them. Because all large machines in The Culture are intelligent. Good luck with that. Also The Culture is not something like the glitter belt of Revelation Space, where somebody can sign a contract to give away their voting rights or something. So the power of a sociopath is already limited.

not solved alignment

They both have, and it doesn't matter. They have because any mind-equiv mind who goes mad gets destroyed (they literally need to take care of large group of humans or go mad, they have symbiotic relationship with humanity), or if they try to go foom they sublime, in the culture universe, sublimation is inevitable. (Therein also lies the real distopian part, considering sublimation is seen as so amazing that keeping a whole culture away from proven heaven seems like an angle to take, then the deathism also would be an argument, but more like that they let people die without going to heaven (but again, this is not subtext, culture not going poof is seen as very weird, only question is why a Yud-equiv mind doesn't come back to uplift the physical universe)).

A manipulated population

Not subtext, but simply text. Often criticized in various ways. But also a lot of behavior outside of the norm is tolerated, see the lava boat ride (where the only person not tolerated is the one having a 'this is a simulation' break). Or the guy just building a cable system.

Not mentioned:

consent

(This is also why humans are not pets).

But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading.

Proceeds to just make new things up and misunderstand inconsequential aspects of things that were already there

“let me be really brave and unique: let's imagine culture is how the azadians (or veppers, or the affront, or even the gfcf…) see them. let's ignore the basic fact that this misconception is the main reason why culture's opponents, ultimately, lose. i am very intelligent.”

Have they ever discussed how much they take on average?

clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs

aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho

I’m a bit split on this one

on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish

on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment

but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|

Slack CEO responded there that it was all a "billing mistake" and that they'll do better in the future and people are having none of it.

A rare orange site W, surprisingly heartwarming.

I’m convinced the proliferation of AI art comes from a generation of digital inhalants.

Nvidia and California College of the Arts Enter Into a Partnership

Oh, I'm sure the artists enrolling at the CCA are gonna be so happy to hear they've been betrayed

The collaboration with CCA is described in today’s announcement as aiming to “prepare a new generation of creatives to thrive at the intersection of art, design and emerging technologies.”

Hot take: There is no "intersection" between these three, because the "emerging technologies" in question are a techno-fascist ideology designed to destroy art for profit

All Söder does is spew bullshit and post bad tiktoks.

Hold on, we might just have found the first job LLMs actually can replace.

I still read xkcd regularly and think it's pretty good. I don't think "we" as a community need to have a particular opinion of Randall Munroe or his work but personally I think he seems alright and I enjoy the things he makes.

Seems like a stretch to assume that comic does anything to recruit rationalists. If you're not already in the rat pipeline it's just a pretty good joke about probability and if you are, it's still a better example of Bayesian reasoning than whatever the rats pretend to do.

He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.

maybe this just betrays that i don't know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once

I follow it on RSS, it's sometime's funny but not required reading.

I don't think you can blame the comic's author for people on HN and elsewhere passing around references to specific comics to make their points.

As to the specific one mentioned here, I don't remember reading it before.

edit to add sometimes it's obvious the entire joke is in the alt-text, like so: https://xkcd.com/3143/

I think it's important to remember that Bayes was a real guy and bayesian statistics is a real useful thing even though Those Guys made it their religion. And they don't really understand bayesian statistics anyway.

The 17 rules also seem to have abuse build in. Documents need to be stored redundantly (without any mention of how many copies that means), and it has a system where people are billed for the data they store. Combine these and storing your data anywhere runs the risk of a malicious actor emptying your accounts. In a 'it costs ten bucks to store a file here' 'sorry we had to securely store ten copies of your file, 100 bucks please'. Weird sort of rules. Feels a lot like it never figured out what it wants to be a centralized or distributed system, a system where writers can make money, or they need to pay to use. And a lot of technical solutions for social problems.

It's nice to be reminded that the past was also crazy.

Xanadu’s micropayment-oriented transclusion-and-royalty system is impossible to correctly implement, due to a mismatch between information theory and copyright; given the ability to copy text, copyright is provably absurd

it kept being funny to me that even while xanadu had already shown the problems with content control the entirety of the NFT craze just went on as if it was full greenfields novel problem

The details lie in the devil, for sure…you’d want the price [of making a change to a document] low enough (zero?) not to incur Trivial Inconvenience penalties for prosocial things like building wikis, yet high enough to make the David Gerards of the world think twice.

some of these people just really don't know their history very well, do they

on a total tangent:

while xanadu's commercial-aspiration history is intimately tied up in why it never got much further, I do occasionally daydream about if we had, and if we could've combined it with more-modern signing and sourcing: daydream in the respect of "CA and cert chains, but for transcluded content", esp in the face of all the fucking content mills used to push disinfo etc. not sure this would work ootb either, mind you, it's got its own set of vulnerabilities and problems that you'd need to work through (and ofc you can't solve social problems purely in the technical domain)

has there been any meaningful advancement or neat new research in agoric computing? haven't really looked into it in a while, and the various blockchain nonsense took so much air out of the room for so long I haven't had to spoons to look

(separately I know there's also been some developments in remote trusted compute, but afaict that's also still quite early days)

It's because of research in the mid-80s leading to Moravec's paradox — sensorimotor stuff takes more neurons than basic maths — and Sharp's 1983 international release of the PC-1401, the first modern pocket computer, along with everybody suddenly learning about Piaget's research with children. By the end of the 80s, AI research had accepted that the difficulty with basic arithmetic tasks must be in learning simple circuitry which expresses those tasks; actually performing the arithmetic is easy, but discovering a working circuit can't be done without some sort of process that reduces intermediate circuits, so the effort must also be recursive in the sense that there are meta-circuits which also express those tasks. This seemed to line up with how children learn arithmetic: a child first learns to add by counting piles, then by abstracting to symbols, then by internalizing addition tables, and finally by specializing some brain structures to intuitively make leaps of addition. But sometimes these steps result in wrong intuition, and so a human-like brain-like computer will also sometimes be wrong about arithmetic too.

As usual, this is unproblematic when applied to understanding humans or computation, but not a reasonable basis for designing a product. Who would pay for wrong arithmetic when they could pay for a Sharp or Casio instead?

Bonus: Everybody in the industry knew how many transistors were in Casio and Sharp's products. Moravec's paradox can be numerically estimated. Moore's law gives an estimate for how many transistors can be fit onto a chip. This is why so much sci-fi of the 80s and 90s suggests that we will have a robotics breakthrough around 2020. We didn't actually get the breakthrough IMO; Moravec's paradox is mostly about kinematics and moving a robot around in the world, and we are still using the same kinematic paradigms from the 80s. But this is why bros think that scaling is so important.

Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science

The general idea among computer scientists is that analog TMs are not more powerful than digital TMs. The supposed advantage of an analog machine is that it can store real numbers that vary continuously while digital machines can only store discrete values, and a real number would require an infinite number of discrete values to simulate. However, each real number "stored" by an analog machine can only be measured up to a certain precision, due to noise, quantum effects, or just the fact that nothing is infinitely precise in real life. So, in any reasonable model of analog machines, a digital machine can simulate an analog value just fine by using enough precision.

There aren't many formal proofs that digital and analog are equivalent, since any such proof would depend on exactly how you model an analog machine. Here is one example.

Quantum computers are in fact (believed to be) more powerful than classical digital TMs in terms of efficiency, but the reasons for why they are more powerful are not easy to explain without a fair bit of math. This causes techbros to get some interesting ideas on what they think quantum computers are capable of. I've seen enough nonsense about quantum machine learning for a lifetime. Also, there is the issue of when practical quantum computers will be built.

AGI: I'm not a superintelligence, I'm you.

this is one of those things that's, in a narrative sense, a great way to tell a story, while being completely untethered from fact/reality. and that's fine! stories have no obligation to be based in fact!

to put a very mild armchair analysis about it forward: it's playing on the definition of the conceptual "smart" computer, as it relates to human experience. there's been a couple of other things in recent history that I can think of that hit similar or related notes (M3GAN, the whole "omg the AI tricked us (and then the different species with a different neurotype and capability noticed it!)" arc in ST:DIS, the last few Mission Impossible films, etc). it's one of those ways in which art and stories tend to express "grappling with $x to make sense of it"

The idea that a smart computer will be worse at math (which makes sense from a storytelling perspective as a writer, because smart AI who also can do math super well is gonna be hard to write)

personally speaking, one of the ways about it that I find most jarring is when the fantastical vastly outweighs anything else purely for narrative reasons - so much so that it's a 4th-wallbreak for me ito what the story means to convey. I reflect on this somewhat regularly, as it's a rather cursed rabbithole that instances repeatedly: "is it my knowledge of this domain that's spoiling my enjoyment of this thing, or is the story simply badly written?" is the question that comes up, and it's surprisingly varied and complicated in its answering

on the whole I think it's often good/best to keep in mind that scifi is often an exploration and a pressure valve, but that it's also worth keeping an eye on how much it's a pressure valve. too much of the latter, and something(tm) is up

If you were to create a humanlike artificial intelligence (in the sense of a whole cognitive apparatus for learning, emotions, motivation etc etc; not in the sense of a chatbot), you would basically just create a guy. Worse: a baby, with the potential of becoming a guy. Generality requires tradeoffs in specificity and such. The smaller and more tightly circumscribable the types of things an intelligent system is supposed to handle are, the more right, fast, etc. the system can be. Wire a button to a bell and the bell's intelligence will accurately ring the bell when the button is pressed. Create a human child and your resulting intelligence has the full range from Gustav Fechner to someone who desperately wants to impress Elizier Yudkowski. It can potentially tackle any sort of problem, but none necessarily well.

That's why the "rationalist" fictions about Bayesian superintelligences miss the mark, too. A Bayesian intelligence will use the result of tempering prior information with new information. If they are right in their starting point, then it's not that impressive if they are right afterwards. If their priors are fucked, theyd conclude bullshit like a misinformed human would. Garbage in, garbage out

But yeah; AGI, ignoring that chatbots won't ever be that, would be just some guy.

@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 seems plausible tbh

This isn't an idea that I've heard of until you mentioned it, so it likely hasn't got much purchase in the public consciousness. (Intuitively speaking, a computer which sucks at maths isn't a good computer, let alone AGI material.)

Not sure if analog turing machines provide any new capabilities that digital TMs do, but I leave that question for the smarter people in the subject of theorethical computer science) did.

Capabilities in the sense that they can compute problems that digital TMs cannot? No, they cannot Capabilities in the sense they'd be more efficient at computing some problems than digital TMs? Hard af to prove or disprove.