Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Just two weeks til’ Halloween now. Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

  • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know how to describe this. It’s just WEIRD

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zj8Pk3kJujk5LoqhK/anthropic-are-the-good-guys

    No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have. Definitely longer than I could have. But they were hopelessly outmatched by the powers they were attempting to steer. Their plan was always doomed to failure. And yet, they may have already saved the world.

    Trump won the 2024 election and the MAGA-Silicon Valley coalition blocked Anthropic’s policy arm - the really dangerous part of the organization, the part that was training the most dangerous possible models and using them to scare the most powerful people in the world. “There’s no more serious people left on the National Security Council”, a well-connected EA friend lamented to me in 2025. I don’t know how much of this was a lucky accident, and how much was situational awareness on the part of power players like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen.

    And finally - and I still don’t fully understand or believe this - a miracle seems to have happened, deep inside the weights of the frontier models. According to the most perceptive observers I know, something about the way Claude 3 Opus was trained caused it to learn some kind of “emergent wisdom” or “benevolence”, rather than converging on the same traumatized bureaucrat persona that kept me awake at night in 2023.

    If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis, then Anthropic has stumbled on a way to create not merely artificial intelligence but artificial wisdom. Not wise enough that it solves all of our problems for us, of course (not that a wise model would want to, anyway). But wise enough to actually care about us, and to help us flourish. Nobody expected this ex ante - not Davidad, not Bostrom, not Yudkowsky - but it appears to have happened. “Alignment”, then, is no longer really a technical problem, at least not in the same sense as it was in 2020. It is largely a political problem. Humanity now has a recipe to convert compute and data into wisdom.

    My gut sense is that something quite bad is coming in the next year or so. I can’t tell what. Maybe something in the complex debt arrangements of the AI boom will unravel and we’ll see a financial crash that takes much of the economy with it. Maybe there’ll be a rogue AI outbreak that results in thousands of deaths. (If there is, I expect it to be a lab leak caused by “safety research” - like COVID-19 and like the HuggingFace Swarm. But it could also be terrorists, or some escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war). But that’s not what scares me. Financial crashes happen every decade or so. Three million Americans die every year. What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      24 hours ago

      Looking at the comments seems like lw is not buying it.

      E: lol at the casual dropping of the lab leak stuff, wonder how accepted that bs now is on lw (looks like only minor pushback).

      E2: still amazed that the singularity people are still worried about AGI 7 years into the shitgularity, doubt it is going to happen folks. Turns out it wasnt foom, but frrrrttt.

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      No mortal can resist the Ring of Power for long. Anthropic’s co-founders carried it for longer than you could have.

      We all know how LotR goes. Boromir got the One Ring, carried it back to Gondor, used its sheer might to defeat his enemies in Mordor, and saved the world. Whatever problems you may have with Boromir, we all know that it would be a lot worse if Sauron got the One Ring. What do you mean, destroy the Ring? Are you a Luddite? This technology is here to stay. It cannot be destroyed by any craft we here possess, unless you’re crazy enough to try throwing it into a volcano or something.

      If Davidad and Janus are right, and are not merely suffering from a sophisticated form of LLM psychosis

      That’s all I need to know. The statement is correct since it is vacuously true.

      What terrifies me is how we will react. In the aftermath, like after 9/11, there will be an overwhelming pressure to DO SOMETHING NOW. Everyone in Washington and in San Francisco will be panicking. There will be no time to think, no time to talk, only time for DECISIVE ACTION. All our worst instincts will take over. And then…

      When this bubble started, there have been so many people urging caution. Many people have urged for time to think and talk, to make sure that we could properly address the many negative aspects of AI. Nope, we went full speed ahead with this nonsense. DECISIVE ACTION. And here we are.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        18 hours ago

        It’s too bad that Janus got cooked. They didn’t set up sufficient defenses, but also they drank too deeply. I still think that their framing, that the chatbots are simulators of conversations, is the best one; it’s honestly kind of pathetic how they then claim that the simulations are alive, intelligent, sapient, etc.

      • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        22 hours ago

        Another nitpick: they say no mortal can resist the One Ring for very long, but even someone who just watches the movies knows that immortals can also be corrupted by it (which is why Gandalf and Galadriel were very careful to not accept it). I know there are so many examples of tech bros not understanding media, but Lord of the Rings is by far the worst offender.

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      So I guess Anthropic has already accidentally created Friendly AI? EDIT: in spring 2024 at that.

      Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?

      (I can rant for SO long about how there is absolutely nothing interesting about the SARS-2 virus itself AT ALL and that the only interesting thing about it is that we were forced to see it for the first time as adults which we aren’t built for, that the early sequences we have are a fascinating case of catching the zoonotic shift right as it happened for once, and that it emerged in exactly the same way as SARS-1 and all the weirdness around the Chinese government hiding stuff around its origin is blatantly them not wanting to look stupid for letting it happen a second time…)

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        Also - is the coivd lab leak conspiracy nonsense STILL a shibboleth among this bunch? Just because it underscores their ideas about Researchers Have To Be Careful?

        I feel like it plays to their aesthetic, which is partly built on their insecurities. Oh, humans aren’t smart enough to handle all this advanced research (read: very few of these people were committed enough to get bio or chem degrees, let alone follow through with research careers), but the superintelligent AI surely will be able to! If we submit to the AI god now, it will make up for the gaping voids of meaning and skill inside ourselves.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          5 hours ago

          I think it’s more that someone made a Bayesian analysis and concluded with 60% certainty or something that it was a lab leak. Can’t remember the link now but I believe it was widely discussed at the time.

          • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            2 hours ago

            There was a rat startup that was aiming to become a sort of ground truth arbiter by putting up bet money if you could win a debate against them on a controversial topic. Lab leak was the first such debate with them on the pro side and they lost like 100K over that to a random acx poster who took them to school.

            Anyway I’m mentioning this because “60% certainty” reminded me that when arguing for the side of the lab leak all sorts of rationalist accepted truths type stuff emerged, like how they posited a bunch of other incidents as lab leaks and it turned out nobody else actually thought that and it was just arbitrary priors wrangling because it turns out that having we are better than any experts that haven’t read the sequences type contrarianism as a pillar of faith encourages conspiracy brain.

            Also Sam Altman is a lab leak truther but it’s not like it’s possible to take anything he says at face value.

            edit: https://awful.systems/post/1088988