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blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
481
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • From the preprint:

    The key formula (39) for the amplitude in this region was first conjectured by GPT-5.2 Pro and then proved by a new internal OpenAI model.

    "Methodology: trust us, bro"

    Edit: Having now spent as much time reading the paper as I am willing to, it looks like the first so-called great advance was what you'd get from a Mathematica's FullSimplify, souped up in a way that makes it unreliable. The second so-called great advance, going from the special cases in Eqs. (35)--(38) to conjecturing the general formula in Eq. (39), means conjecturing a formula that... well, the prefactor is the obvious guess, the number of binomials in the product is the obvious guess, and after staring at the subscripts I don't see why the researchers would not have guessed Eq. (39) at least as an Ansatz.

    All the claims about an "internal" model are unverifiable and tell us nothing about how much hand-holding the humans had to do. Writing them up in this manner is, in my opinion, unethical and a detriment to science. Frankly, anyone who works for an AI company and makes a claim about the amount of supervision they had to do should be assumed to be lying.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Someone claiming to be one of the authors showed up in the comments saying that they couldn't have done it without GPT... which just makes me think "skill issue", honestly.

    Even a true-blue sporadic success can't outweigh the pervasive deskilling, the overstressing of the peer review process, the generation of peer reviews that simply can't be trusted, and the fact that misinformation about physics can now be pumped interactively to the public at scale.

    "The bus to the physics conference runs so much better on leaded gasoline!" "We accelerated our material-testing protocol by 22% and reduced equipment costs. Yes, they are technically blood diamonds, if you want to get all sensitive about it..."

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • object level issue

    <Kill Bill air raid sirens.mp4>

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market is... what's the superlative of "lolz"?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • I do believe that's literally how the automation dystopia began in Vonnegut's Player Piano.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • "Can't read" is the kind of insult we don't need in this context.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • A polycule with Aella, otherwise known as a nightmare fuck rotation

  • AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster

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  • Awful.systems is not debate club. Nor is it peer-review club. No one is obligated to nitpick individual sentences in a preprint or erect monuments of text about details within it, particularly when a discussion of the broader failings of the "research" culture in that area is more interesting, valuable and on-brand.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • How much do people actually "like to claim to have read" books, rather than saying they want to read more big books but never have the time?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • There's a letter in the book of Asimov's correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he'd been asked "How close are we to George Orwell's 1984?" again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.

    He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • Ryan Mac:

    Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

    We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

    For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

    Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

    Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir's chairman and tells Epstein there is "no need to rush." This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

    Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel's VC funds.

    One of @ering.bsky.social's great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the "optics" of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

    So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

    At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

    [...]

    While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

    I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

    https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • I think Dominic Housatonic developed into a mushroom cloud as it progressed (past the interval captured by the slowmo).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

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  • For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein's Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the "Solicitation of prostitution" section includes this:

    In June 2008, after pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,[27] Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. He served 13 months, and upon release became a registered sex offender.[3][28] There is widespread controversy and suspicion that Epstein got off lightly.[29]

    At this point, I don't care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein's crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

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  • Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein's reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing... One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much "reputation management"&mdash;i.e., enabling&mdash; was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims... It's all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a "Solicitation of prostitution" section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18... And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can't have done anything that bad, could he?

    There's a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he'd introduce them to a financier who loved science... rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.

    Maybe another way to say the above: We're learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

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  • ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. [...] When it launched, a bulk of Grokipedia’s articles were direct clones of Wikipedia, though many others reflected racist and transphobic views. For example, articles about Musk conveniently downplays his family wealth and unsavory elements of their past (like neo-Nazi and pro-Apartheid views) and the entry for “gay pornography” falsely linked the material to the worsening of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The article on US slavery still contains a lengthy section on “ideological justifications,” including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” [...] “Grokipedia feels like a cosplay of credibility,” said Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush. “It might work inside its own bubble, but the idea that Google or OpenAI would treat something like Grokipedia as a serious, default reference layer at scale is bleak.”

    https://www.theverge.com/report/870910/ai-chatbots-citing-grokipedia

    The entire AI industry is using the Nazi CSAM machine for training data.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

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  • We will soon merge with and become hybrids of human consciousness and artificial intelligence ( created by us and therefore of consciousness)

    &mdash;Deepak Chopra to Jeffrey Epstein