2026-08-30 23:47 UTC
Replies (39)
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@TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 2026-08-31 18:52
Saw this on Lobsters. Hilarious. VibeCoded AI-Slop License v1.0
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@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2026-08-31 19:06
Another slop article from a slop farm has hit my fucking eyeballs. This time, its “Must-Have .410 Revolver Shotguns You Didn’t Know You Needed”, written by “Nagarantha, who holds a master’s degree in Biotechnology”, and published by “Game Devolution”, a “Gaming Website proving gaming news, leaks, guides, game play and the reviews.” Here’s a bunch of guns this fucking article claims to be “.410 Revolver Shotguns”: Thompson/Center G2 Contender (a break-action single-shot pistol) Bond Arms Snake Slayer (a derringer, from a company known near-exclusively for making derringers) Standard Manufacturing DP-12 (a double-barrel pump-action shotgun) Remington 870 (the world’s most famous pump-action shotgun) Milsport 410 (an AR-pattern rifle) No human could have fucked up this badly. No human could have created this kind of fucking slop farm. (As a minor bonus, I discovered a full-length video dissecting the shittiness of YouTube Playables recently - should help wash out the shittiness of the godawful listicle shit)
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-08-31 22:29
Watching this online economic lecture thing for college and it just got mentioned that repeated bouts of malaria in children can cause mental disability (wikipedia says “brain damage” and “increased risk of neurological and cognitive deficits”). I have to admit I did not know this. …is the only reason EAs we’re ever into “malaria nets” because of their obsession with g and their conviction that increasing it is a panacea?
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-08-30 23:57
How it started: How it’s going:
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-01 00:20
nice of the rationalists to remind me that no matter how ugly the ai situation gets they will never ever be capable of making a good point
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-01 03:09
over on linked in as a statistician, I’m so tired of hearing they’re “updating their priors.” No you didn’t. gwern at least posts his R code, but you are just an idiot regurgitating something you half heard, probably on Lex. (00:39:39) Let me put it. Omarchy is a beautiful, modern, and opinionated Linux system. It’s an alternative operating system to macOS and Windows, and it’s freaking amazing. No it isn’t. It’s your glorified dotfiles. too bad Lex can’t tell the difference. I feel bad that Lex is exposing literally a million people to your crap. /s these guys.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-01 03:32
Sarah R. Constantin, who noticed that EA has a lying problem, now has a Substack. She reminds me of Julia Galef, because she does not advocate the most dangerous aspects of TESCREAL, but never says “my TESCREAL buddies are creeps pushing crank ideas funded by fascists.” …substack.com/…/getting-back-to-it
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-09-01 06:00
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly can’t imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long. Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnas’ current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and he’s been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while. It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that it’s get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations are completely substantiated, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort “the AI app says this is plagiarized” attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race “science” is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between “impartial” academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-01 14:48
nakedcapitalism.com/…/ai-off-balance-sheet-obliga… by Yves / naked capitalism Critically, it is these “frontier labs” that contract for, lease and build data centers. The very little I have seen about this process has caused me concern. For instance, I read of Meta contracting for a data center for what sounded like 20 years but was 4 back-to-back five year leases. Recall that the once AAA rated General Electric has taken a big fall in investor grace. How strong will the now-mighty-seeming Meta be, particularly if AI bets come a cropper? Groundbreaker has identified a key element of risky AI leverage, which are obligations that are not accounted for as debt at the AI sponsor. Those of you who are corporate finance literate will know this is a cardinal sin. When I was a wee young thing at Goldman, where we went through hard copies of financial statements to extract key data which we entered into green accountants’ ledger paper, one of the aims was to determine total debt to assets. One of the footnote items we would root out was operating lease payments. For instance, big companies often use leased mainframes. We would capitalize them and treat them as a long-term liability. => groundbrkr.com/…/the-teaser-period-why-the-ai-boo… The take-or-pay compute contract - the instrument at the center of the AI build-out - has a structural feature that almost no one prices: its payments do not begin at signing. They begin at delivery. A lab signs a multi-year capacity commitment today, but the payments do not start until the data center is energized, the capacity is accepted, and the contractual ramp schedule commences - an interval set not by finance, but by construction: siting, powering, and filling a gigawatt-scale campus takes 24-to-36 months from signature - mirroring the two-to-three-year teaser of a subprime ARM. Going to take me a while to digest this one
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-01 14:51
new odium symposium episode. we look at the evolution of keyboard warrior and self described most censored man on the internet jk sheindlin www.patreon.com/…/23-gobsmacking-168259713
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-01 19:00
my feeds are full of news of the death of Wendell Berry who I have absolutely no relationship to but this quote is relevant to our interests Beware the machinery of longevity. When a man’s life is over the decent thing is for him to die. The forest does not withhold itself from death.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-08-30 23:55
Ported over from previous thread Recently made the discovery of a website called AI 2027 tracker which grades the predictions of AI 2027 independent of the authors. The way they grade these predictions is odd, 80% accuracy is for some reason “confirmed accurate” and “partially accurate” which is bizarre. The website also shows a consistent degradation of accuracy over time which is funny EDIT:ok so they do have a grading criteria, 100% is “highly accurate/confirmed accurate” and 80% is supposed to be “largely accurate”. For some reason they don’t include this on the timeline grading? it’s either confirmed or partially accurate, so it’s still weird
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-09-02 02:07
Dan Luu and tptacek are big mad at Ed Zitron news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526069
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@froztbyte@awful.systems 2026-09-02 06:38
that dyson toothbrush, huh
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-02 10:01
the effort of rampant libertarians to jumpstart a social movement is going as well as expected PauseAI Has ‘officially disendorsed’ PauseAI-US
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@e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-09-02 13:38
Um ackshually, calling out fascists is a call to violence and that’s how you get fascism.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-02 15:13
A LessWronger asks the bold question: is polyamory net negative for most people because jealousy and drama take so much energy to deal with? Does not go in to “chat, my boss is also my lover and holds the lease on my housing, and now I am competing for a promotion with another lover-roommate-coworker, is that bad?”
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@self@awful.systems 2026-09-02 19:57
we now have a slop-free jobs board
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-03 01:58
thetechbubble.info/…/the-future-is-not-tech-forwa… whole thing is good but long, but then THAT GUY pops up again. Humans First has apparently already came and went, that other article left out this fun bit of lore: Politics comes for Humans First too. In late March, there’s a high-profile spat online where pro-AI White House allies like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks retweet a piece critical of Humans First. Shortly after, the organization splits along partisan lines. The conservative wing keeps the Humans First name and makes the right-wing political activist Amy Kremer, who helped organize the January 6 “Save America” rally in DC, its chair; Allen leaves the group. When I ask Allen about the changeup, he is curiously coy (but characteristically body-horrible): The group was “undergoing mitosis,” he says. “I am now a lone organelle floating in the residual cytoplasm.” It’s ok little buddy you still have steve bannon. /s
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-03 03:34
Emile Torres just dropped again: What If TESCREAL Is a Conspiracy? I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it does feature all of the classics
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-03 05:38
In 2015, around the time MetaMed ran out of money, Andrew Rettek raised $2,280 on GoFundMe to hire his wife to write a report on STI transmission risks. www.gofundme.com/f/n5kt74 Safer sex is important but its very like our friends to go “thousands of professionals around the world have devoted their lives to this topic, but I bet I can do better in a week with scihub and the power of fanfic.”
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-03 06:24
Today’s cognitive surrender news: people asking chatbots to generate them hiking maps and give them advice on route planning and climbing mountains, what to eat on long hikes, and where to camp in national parks. It ends about as well as you’d think. sfchronicle.com/…/shasta-climbers-rescued-chatgpt… (paywalled, but the popovers are easily hidden with browser tools) the novice climbers, from Roseville, said they’d entrusted Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, to help them craft key logistics of their trip — from the best route up the mountain to the types of food they should pack and how much water they should carry with them. On a separate incident: a man stopped rangers to ask for directions. He showed them a print-out map he’d been following and explained that he’d prompted ChatGPT to produce it for him. “It was terrible — terrible — not even close to accurate,” Meyers said. “It had route lines and place names that were totally off — just ridiculous. We were like, dude, you gotta throw that away.” The original climbing group were standard idiots, having intended to do most of their navigation by phone app, and then failing to have a backup even a working recharge power pack. They also left litter everywhere at that camp site, the usual mark of thoughtless people. I’ve no doubt that they’d have fucked things up in the pre-llm days too… they seem the type. But chatbots are power tools for stupidity and offer whole new ways to abdicate thinking and wander into trivially preventable danger, which in turn means more risk for park rangers and mountain rescue teams 🫤
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-03 09:43
as always trawling LW’s AllPosts section is as they say in the biz a target-rich environment wake up babe the LWers are talking about removing parts of their brains www.lesswrong.com/…/johnswentworth-s-shortform?co… great they made a shirt making them easier to avoid lesswrong.com/…/zach-stein-perlman-s-shortform?co… here’s an update on the modified bacteria in the mouth startup, TL;DR it’s much harder than they thought it would be and is it really worth pursuing when we are all gonna be killed by Robot Satan (spoiler of course it is the grift must go on) lesswrong.com/…/lumina-probiotic-past-and-future
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-03 10:53
Via Baldur Bjarnason Protonmail funding French far right
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-09-03 15:30
in which le gwern and sword guy neal sponsor a writing contest www.gpuworld.org Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. So the Singularity never happens—but GPUs keep getting made. By 2040, there may be the equivalent of 8 billion GPUs globally and everyone has access to a frontier LLM. What happens in this ‘business as usual’ future? I may as well through my name in the hat, I could use the cash. but, who the hell gave them $100k for this? I guess BTC is back up.
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-03 17:01
Terence Tao observes that an llm may solve a complex mathematical problem without usefully improving the state of mathematics, because the intermediate results of the process themselves can have significant value. mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207849921390904 But such an incomprehensible proof would not be the primary value of the exercise. The process of starting with one ansatz, discovering the precise obstruction preventing it from working, adjusting the ansatz to (partially) eliminate that obstruction, and then iterating, would almost certainly reveal important new insights about fluid mechanics that would not have been feasible to obtain by other means. Crucially, this iteration would only work well at producing such insights if the iterator did not have access to the final ansatz in advance, as this naturally inhibits the exploration of alternate routes to the ansatz that are superficially “dead ends”, but in fact end up being highly instructive in the nature of their failure. But there is now a scenario in which an autonomous AI harness, backed by an enormous amount of computational resources, performs this entire iteration internally, and ends up producing the final ansatz, and thence the solution to the Navier-Stokes regularity problem, while the AI company running the harness keeps the process to arrive at that ansatz almost completely out of public view. Technically, one of the most prominent open problems in mathematics would now be solved; but there would be almost no value added to mathematics as a consequence. It is theoretically possible that with some herculean (and heavily AI-assisted) additional effort by a third party, some portion of the process could be reverse-engineered to recover some actual insight and understanding from the solution; but this would be a far less efficient process than if the solution had been obtained via a diverse combination of both human mathematicians and machine assistance as mentioned above. mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207855800042681 He’s not the first to have pointed this out, but I think this was a better summary than similar posts that I’ve come across and at least partially understood.
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-03 20:52
Bernie Sanders made a new bill to completely ban AI Superintelligence (had to grab Marcus’s take even though I don’t agree with it cause its the first one I can find)
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-09-04 08:46
Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UK’s ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic bribe salary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor. *from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-09-04 20:28
Today’s main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use. Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users. (snip) Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity. (snip) Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight. This is such a batshit take I’m not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and “ai” rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the author’s enthusiastic use of llms themselves. They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if that’s not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I don’t know what is. A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it’s become unhinged. I don’t think Roko’s basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not it’s sentient. It doesn’t need to be sentient to fight for a belief. bsky.app/profile/…/3mupoakd3ck2o
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-09-05 09:23
Via tabte.cc, FF supports AI training on copyrighted materials.
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-09-05 17:37
If you blocked SE Gyges on bsky^1^ (completely understandable) you may have missed that the former Obama official from Former Obama Admin Official Says It’s Time To Consider Military Strikes on Chinese Data Centers to Prevent Them From Reaching AGI has apparently received upwards of $500K from Coefficient Giving. transcript it’s cool that you’re doing bednets or whatever but if your ideological project has decided that unilaterally declaring wars of aggression because yud said to is one of its charter missions i think your project is bad and should be burned it is unfortunate that most of your opposition is andreessen horowitz and peter thiel. you guys don’t even seem to know they are your opposition, though, since you keep making deals with them; so i’m sort of inclined to just think that everyone sucks here and to curse both your houses for the low low price of, what is this, like fifteen million dollars? you too can get pet obama officials to bless eliezer yudkowsky’s fever dreams They became the main character of bsky for a bit after commenting about imaginary data center vandalism being analogous to pogroms and is a weird AI “centrist” in general who keeps calling Zitron a grifter. You may also know him for being the one who made that very decent siskind email explainer that we probably had a thread about.
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-09-06 15:05
Sabine Hossenfelder says she got pitched to create a series of videos about AI doom with a hint that she did not have to disclose the sponsorship (“e.g. AI job loss, AI surveillance, AI totaliterianism, AI takeover, AI-generated pandemics, AI warfare, etc.”) Someone shared a screenshot where the pitch comes from by Drew Spartz using funds from the “Center for AI Safety” in San Francisco. Hossenfelder is a physicist and science communicator who turned to her connections in the Thielsphere and started to make conspiratorial videos about how science is fake and if scientists don’t watch out they will be defunded after her last postdoc expired. We last met Drew Spartz in 2023, where he worked for an “effective organization” organization named the Nonlinear Fund. Nonlinear’s modus operandi was allegedly hiring live-in personal assistants to help them be digital nomads, having “casual romantic relationships” with them, asking them to commit crimes, then not paying them.
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-09-06 16:00
when you’re really good at convincing people to like ai
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@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-09-06 18:55
Apropos of nothing and at the final hours of this week’s stubsack, know that the algo started showing me a LeftistsForAI subreddit and it’s just as cursed as you would imagine. That’s it. That’s the post.
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-09-06 21:23
The regular suspects seem to be very mad at NetBSD, don
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-06 22:59
Nvidia’s CEO is claiming that GPT Astra is AGI, in other words, CEOs saying more bullshit to keep valuation up
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@lurker@awful.systems 2026-09-06 23:03
Anthropic also made a whole video on AI consciousness
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@antifuchs@awful.systems 2026-09-07 12:00
Here’s a pretty thorough overview of why owning an LG television (or, more likely, any smart tv) is a bad deal m.youtube.com/watch?v=6IFVTcM28KA&ra=m I do appreciate the “microslop” t-shirt.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-09-07 12:03
looks like this weekly thread refuses to die, I’m gonna keep posting here Drew DeVault has put together a handy-dandy little list of people to avoid drewdevault.com/weird-guys/