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Fake journalist with AI slop avatar and slop credentials starts rising in Substack's "politics" rankings, someone asks the Substack CEO what they're going to do about it, and gets told to pound sand.
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and ...
The Joscha Bach Substack article is a strange mix of self-pity, JAQing off, and eugenics. He compares Namibian babies he saw in a documentary to great apes in terms of their childhood development, cites studies showing lower cognitive ability among African American children, and then gets all emotional over the fact that people might think he's a bit of a racist.
AI attracts so many racists -- especially the kind who can't tell that they're racist. I guess it's inevitable for any field of study that includes the word 'intelligence" in its name.
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I didn't realize this was part of the rationalist-originated "AI Village" project. See https://sage-future.org/ and https://theaidigest.org/village. Involved members and advisors include Eli Lifland and Daniel Kokotajlo of "AI 2027" infamy.
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I hate-listen to his podcast. There's not a single week where he fails to give a thorough tongue-bath to some AI hypester. Just a few weeks ago when Google released Gemini 3, they had a special episode just to announce it. It was a defacto press release, put out by Kevin and Casey.
She seems to think Urbit became crappy, when in fact it was crappy from the start. It's what you get when you throw a handful of D-tier engineers at a shitty idea promoted by a fascist loon who loves the smell of his own farts.
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Bay Area rationalist Sam Kirchner, cofounder of the Berkeley "Stop AI" group, claims "nonviolence isn't working anymore" and goes off the grid. Hasn't been heard from in weeks.
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Some of our very best friends (including Dan Hendrycks, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, and Yoshua Bengio) just uploaded to arxiv a preprint that attempts to define the term "artificial general intelligence". ...
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In fairness, not everything nVidia does is generative AI. I don't know if this particular initiative has anything to do with GenAI, but a lot of digital artists depend on their graphics cards' capabilities to create art that is very much human-derived.
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Now that his new book is out, Big Yud is on the interview circuit. I hope everyone is prepared for a lot of annoying articles in the next few weeks.
Today he was on the Hard Fork podcast with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton (didn't listen to it yet). There's also a milquetoast profile in the NYT written by Kevin Roose, where Roose admits his P(doom) is between 5 and 10 percent.
Yud: "That's not going to asymptote to a great final answer if you just run them for longer."
Asymptote is a noun, you git. I know in the grand scheme of things this is a trivial thing to be annoyed by, but what is it it with Yud's weird tendency to verbify nouns? Most rationalists seem to emulate him on this. It's like a cult signifier.
With his all-consuming fear of death, Thiel is about as far from being a Christian as one can get. All his antichrist talk is a nakedly transparent attempt to gas up the rubes so they remain on the side of the billionaires even after Trump gives up the ghost. He doesn't believe a single thing he's saying.
I know it's been said thousands of times before, but as a software developer I've never felt a greater sense of job security than I do right now. The amount of work it's going to take to clean up all this slop is going to be monumental. Unfortunately, that kind of work is also soul-deadening.
It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything. ...
Given how often it shows up in his writings, this incel victim narrative is a linchpin to his personality. He even trots it out in the middle of this genocidal screed -- in what on first glance seems to be an irrelevant detour. But it's really not irrelevant. His self-inflicted psychic damage is painfully real and manifests itself in all sorts of toxic and sociopathic ways, including abject dehumanization of an entire population.
Never heard of Ishida, but he sounds like he's yet another one of those people for whom politics and belief are just "vibes". There's no principle, no rational basis, just vibes. I feel like more and more of the world is becoming this way. Or perhaps it always was this way, but the Internet has just made it more evident.
It's bizarre and pathetic how Scott disabled comments on his blog post but is now using Peter Woit's blog to carry on a debate with all the people horrified by his views.
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Last year McDonald's withdrew AI from its own drive-throughs as the tech misinterpreted customer orders - resulting in one person getting bacon added to their ice cream in error, and another having hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets mistakenly added to their order.
Clearly artificial superintelligence has arrived, and instead of killing us all with diamondoid bacteria, it's going to kill us by force-feeding us fast food.
this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who's actively being a drain on the site ...
You don't hear too many leftists saying things like this:
I think that the Democratic Party has two factions; they disagree on a ton of important stuff. I think that the neoliberals are right on nearly all of those disagreements, and the progressives are wrong on nearly all of the disagreements.
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How many times will he need to revise his silly timeline before media figures like Kevin Roose stop treating him like some kind of respectable authority? Actually, I know the answer to that question. They'll keep swallowing his garbage until the bubble finally bursts.
It immediately made me wonder about his background. He's quite young and looks to be just out of college. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably a member of the EA club at Harvard.
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Ozy Brennan tries to explain why "rationalism" spawns so many cults.
One of the reasons they give is "a dangerous sense of grandiosity".
the actual process of saving the world is not very glamorous. It involves filling out paperwork, making small tweaks to code, running A/B tests on Twitter posts.
Yep, you heard it right. Shitposting and inconsequential code are the proper way to save the world.
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I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the site's maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. ...
A series of talks in the Epstein documents
Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th December 2025 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
this is a piece about Urbit by someone who is totally not a nazi for a totally not nazi mag and it's hilarious ( www.compactmag.com )
archive: https://archive.is/jS1PO
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025 ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
New paper tries to define AGI, cites hallucinated papers ( xcancel.com )
Some of our very best friends (including Dan Hendrycks, Max Tegmark, Jaan Tallinn, and Yoshua Bengio) just uploaded to arxiv a preprint that attempts to define the term "artificial general intelligence". ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems ( awful.systems )
Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025 ( awful.systems )
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th September 2025 ( awful.systems )
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Thiel vs EA (let them fight.gif) ( forum.effectivealtruism.org )
A second ScottA post has hit my psyche ( scottaaronson.blog )
Apparently we get a shout-out? Sharing this brings me no joy, and I am sorry for inflicting it upon you.
Vibe-coded build system NX gets hacked, steals vibe-coders’ crypto ( pivot-to-ai.com )
a clown car of clown cars that deploys another clown car, that explodes ...
In which Scott Aaronson creates the most offensive trolley problem imaginable ( scottaaronson.blog )
It might as well be my own hand on the madman’s lever—and yet, while I grieve for all innocents, my soul is at peace, insofar as it’s ever been at peace about anything. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st August 2025 - awful.systems ( awful.systems )
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Oliver Habryka truly understands the soul of SneerClub ( www.lesswrong.com )
this is Habryka talking about how his moderating skills are so powerful it takes lesswrong three fucking years to block a poster who's actively being a drain on the site ...
the "left" gets a new publication, if the "left" is Kelsey Piper and OpenPhil ( www.semafor.com )
Zack Davis doesn't like NYT's Cade Metz comparison of rationalism to religion ( www.lesswrong.com )
Excerpt: ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025 ( awful.systems )
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Meta AI guidelines allow 'sensual' chats with kids, blatant racism ( www.reuters.com )
Reuters reporters got their hands on an internal Meta document describing what's acceptable and unacceptable for a chatbot response. ...
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...
Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025 ( awful.systems )
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. ...