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.
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 so 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. Apologies for not getting the previous one up - my old laptop died)
I can’t belive the fucking New York Post is AI skeptic now
Patrick Boyle over on YT is spreading the good news about the AI hacking/regulation/doom-cult moment.
I don’t know that there’s much new information for anyone on this forum. He starts off with the OpenAI/HF debacle and goes from there, and while I think he anthropomorphizes a little too much in the narrative he has the right take that the marketing disclosures are intended to dodge any kind of reasonable responsibility on behalf of all the people who made obviously bad choices that allowed this to happen. He also notes how convenient it is that this push for greater regulation (in only the exact form that the industry requests, naturally) is happening in the same time as yet another massive fundraising round and IPO buzz and when there doesn’t appear to be new product on the horizon.
However, it is heartening to see these takes getting more traction outside of normal sneer vectors. Patrick’s lane is finance and he’s previously been a bit credulous imo about the tech side of it. One thing I hadn’t been keyed in on is that apparently the markets agreed that this whole affair is a bad look for the AI industry, with cybersecurity stocks jumping and chipmakers and other data center suppliers taking a bath in the aftermath. Might be a good sign, but until the cloud providers start seeing direct financial consequences or we see an even worse IPO than SpaceX had I don’t think we’re seeing the bubble pop just yet.
I just happened to watch the Heute-Show segment on the topic. (german late-night satirical news show, pretty decent takes usually but it’s no ZDF Magazin Royale)
It is nice that the doom claims by AI-CEOs are considered incredulous and their motivation is questioned (financial trouble, flagging product improvement). They certainly weren’t critical enough on some claims, e.g. the “AI hacking” incidents, let alone the inevitable dominance of AI tools. But despite that it was nice to see some sneering of the endless parroting of AI PR pieces that dominates german news.
The election for the new Riksdag in Sweden was last Sunday, and I just checked the list of all votes, including for parties that didn’t crack the 4% electoral count limit
https://resultat.val.se/val2026/RD?r=S
If you scroll down past the racist assholes at the top you’ll find RegleraAI.nu (basically Regulate AI Now) which of course has a website: https://regleraai.nu/. Usual doomer stuff, just in Swedish.
They got 390 votes, more than explicitely Nazi Nordiska motståndsrörelsen at 355.
Sorry for the X screenshot but XCancel is shut down from legal pressure.
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Post by Evan Hubinger on Sep 8:
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
Quote tweet by Jasmine Sun on Sep 9:
I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk:
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Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc
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Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it’s a +EV bet
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Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don’t think about the macro stuff.
Notably, none of this is “I’m hyping up the risk for marketing reasons.” People believe what they say, while being capable of a lot of internal dissonance / compartmentalization / self-justification.
(Personally, I think the public is better served by AI researchers talking about & creating consensus for the specific safety solutions — regulatory or otherwise — they want vs. vagueposting about extinction.)
Normally I’d sneer at their 10% chance of extinction claims, but now that I think about it, if you take their claims seriously at face value, you realize just how these people are monsters. We rightly condemn brutal dictators who commit genocide, but even their crimes would pale in comparison to anything with a 10% chance of exterminating all of humanity.
These “reasons” are laughably indefensible given the supposed stakes here. The first is already terrible, and they just get worse.
- The only moral thing to do here is to immediately stop working for the AI companies, and do whatever you can to stop anyone else. It’s not okay to piss in a pool just because you suspect other people are also doing it. And what makes you think that somehow you are uniquely positioned to succeed in making it safe?
- This is the Sam-Bankman Fried defense (complete with a reference to “EV” (expected value)). When you decide to gamble with the lives of everyone in the entire world, did you first ask them if they are okay with you gambling with their lives? Sure, I might die, but if the ball lands on red, things will be great! How moral does this sound?
- What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.”
Now, I think that these people sincerely believe that AI has a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, because their minds have been poisoned by Rationalist ideology. Their Rationality is so effective that after Bernie Sanders took their premises at face value, they were shocked when Bernie immediately came to the conclusion of locking these people up for 20 years.
There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script. The rule of law does not even occur to them as they treat the extinction of humanity as just another dinner table conversation starter.
Reading this, I get the feeling writers are gonna get a lot of mileage out of the rats and their ideology.
These people have spent years attempting to create something they believe represents an existential threat to humanity (causing untold real-world harm in the process), and they’ve remained fully convinced that they’re the good guys throughout every single step of this.
(complete with a reference to “EV” (expected value))
In this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly. It was kind of cute when this jargon was entering wide use during the online poker bubble, but that was 20 years ago.
What the actual fuck?
This third category is the Patrick Bateman types who would have mainly been confined to finance at the turn of the century. They probably picked San Francisco over New York in part because they were worried the New Yorkers might make them wear a suit.
There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script.
I’ve been thinking more about this lately, and my metamodel of the rationalist world model (if I may get away with such a pretense) is that they subtly believe that the future is already something crystallized, even if they don’t consciously realize they hold this belief. It is not really a probabilistic philosophy, no matter how much they assert that. Intelligence, to them, is a function that can more and more precisely apprehend the future as it escalates to greater values along the g-scale, and the singularity will manifest an intelligence that can do so with practically absolute precision (hence its prophesied ability to outcompete and replace humans).
When I’m talking to people who haven’t encountered this stuff as closely, I half-jokingly describe the reflexive assignment of probability estimates as a devotional practice akin to prayer or meditation… but it really is! It’s a subtle invocation of the AGI/ASI god, in that I make this imprecise estimate now, to demonstrate my belief in a precisely quantifiable future; but come the singularity, God will relieve my feeble human brain from having to commit this lamentable imprecision. In that reckoning, those who are not even willing to venture an imprecise esimate must have no intelligence worth noting.
Ya see, we’re being charitable when we call them grifters instead of genocidaires.
At what point does doing something you think will result in the end of the world become attempted murder?
What the actual fuck? Imagine if Hermann Göring defended himself at Nuremberg by saying, “At least I had fun and got rich and worked on ‘cool tech’ with friends.”
Wernher von Braun is the way better comparison. Just maybe not one we like to make, since he basically got away with it and died an icon of U.S. space exploration.
Goering was pretty unapologetic at Nürnberg afaik, since he knew he was getting the rope.
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A critical piece on EA from somebody who actually lives in one of the poorest places in the world.
Somewhere in 2021, I contacted about a hundred people (mostly individuals) who identify as effective altruists, asking them not for money, but for social media posts …
… one wrote back saying, “I usually share projects that have been vetted by Givewell or a similar organization….Why do you think your project is more effective compared to all the others?”
All that over a social media post.
Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation),
https://gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any-woman-willing-to-date-them-2000814283
Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.
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The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they’re an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They’re rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k).
“These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to… individuals in law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online.”
A friend linked me to FelonyBench which monitors how many laws each of the labs are breaking with their models 😆
This time it’s Gemini which is a super spooky non-aligned volitional x-risk engine in waiting: https://www.reuters.com/business/gemini-hacked-three-companies-first-known-breakout-by-google-ai-wsj-reports-2026-09-18/
We’re all gonna die! seems like a pattern is developing here with a firm called Irregular which mysteriously fails to put their equivalent of a NACL or just something that doesn’t allow outbound traffic when they conduct their network penetration testing.
Saw this post about irregular last week https://www.effort.news/irregular
Omer Nevo, Irregular’s co-founder and CTO, is a board member of Effective Altruism Israel, as well as Effective Altruism NGOs Heron and Probably Good. Dan Lahav, Irregular’s co-founder and CEO, received $395,000 to start a course along with Sella Nevo, Omer Nevo’s brother. Sella and Omer co-founded an NGO to educate people about Effective Altruism, Impact Focused Education. They also co-founded Probably Good together.2
I kind of feel like maybe I should start my own NGO that does fuck all, seems pretty easy
Money is All You Need
their equivalent of a NACL
I can only infer you mean some sort of salt circle to keep the AGI demons at bay.
Tossing a lot of salt into the cooling fans helps to silence the daemons yes.
network access control list, but I am now definitely going to start making references to salt circles when I handle the promptfans
from engadget: Anthropic has set up a bio research lab for physical experiments
the AGI is making the diamandingo bacteria!!! P(doom) just went up 4 epistillion percent
I misread that as 4 Epsteinillion percent
4 epsteinillion is what the next stately EA manor will cost
Do they want their apocalypse to happen?
Still not dodging the Aum Shinrikyo comparisons
well you see they are compelled to work on increasing AI’s capabilities because of this one thought experiment that they came up with a while back
going to keep “4 epistillion percent” in my back pocket from now on
Your favorite “CEO said a thing” journalists, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, are leaving their current podcast and starting a new one.
When they started Hard Fork, they chose the name from the soon-to-be-moribund blockchain concept. Calling their new podcast “Machine Gods” makes me more hopeful than ever that the AI bubble is about to burst.
Apparently they have the same sense of timing as the Blockchain Socialist guy, but he at least picked a brand that isn’t tied to the current hype cycle again.
Machine Gods? Like… really? I thought even Casey Newton would have more taste than that but allegedly he has farmed out he vast majority of his thinking to a machine and one of the “moats” that there “supuh scawwie” machine gods still allegedly can’t cross is taste so maybe that tracks
US government is using spicy autocomplete to hallucinate fake nuclear threats
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/politics/us-military-ai-false-intelligence-china-ship
Holy fuck. How embarrassing would it have been if they actually went through with it and ended up having to explain to China that they attacked a random ship because a chatbot hallucinated some bs
The chinese intelligence people are probably just aghast that american intelligence people are treating the chatbot as if it knows something
I don’t know enough about Chinese state security apparatus to comment about that aspect but I’ve seen some mentions of how the state there is also heavily pushing prompts everywhere, and it’s apparently just as shit a failure as it is in the western sphere…so, could be fucked either way
Just saw on r/sneerclub:
Department of War CTO twitted: “The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸”
And there’s a photo of Trump with the text: “AMERICANISM, NOT EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!”
Here’s the reddit post: https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/1wj6r6n/trump_is_trying_to_win_the_sneerclub_vote/
I…worked on this sneer for years…and…he just…he tweeted it out.
here’s another Rat-explainer piece
https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse/
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746654, where commenters are predictably blasé about it all… “yeah yeah doesn’t everyone know who Big Yud is?”)
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
If we’re lucky, they’ll get left on the same dusty historical shelf as the raelians when this is all over. They’re just too fuckin weird for general consumption.
On the one hand, you do have precedent to point to in hoping they get consigned to the dustbin of history.
On the other hand, the rats have had a colossal(ly negative) effect on the general public (FTX, the AI bubble, the second Trump admin, etcetera), and their extremely high profile makes them much harder to ignore.
in general, I don’t think EA breaking into the mainstream like this led to the outcome they wanted - there’s way more discussion about weird sex and eugenics than the dangers of Robot Satan
The Dangers of Robot Satan™ are unbelievable and/or incomprehensible to most audiences, the weird sex/eugenics shit is easy to grasp and laugh at. Mainly the weird sex shit, the eugenics is too morally fucked to laugh at
The AI Doom™ shit’s much harder for the public to wrap their heads around, but there’s definitely good joke fodder there as well. At the bare minimum, the fact Anthropic’s building something they believe could kill them Terminator style makes for some easy Skynet comparisons.
@BlueMonday1984 Excuse me my friends, but have you heard the Good News about Our Lord and Saviour, Clankie Lucifer™?
The most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have decided that Jacob Coxon does not need an encyclopedia article all about him for now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Jacob_Coxon
muwahaha
Bethany Brookshire (who’s an old pal of mine from our ScienceOnline days) reports:
People are using AI to impersonate real science journalists.
And one even got PUBLISHED.
In Science.
Caroline Williams writes on LinkedIn:
The person who was impersonating me managed to get an article published in Science, under my by-line. And they got paid for it!
I’ve seen the pitches (bad), and the email chain between editors who weren’t all that impressed, but googled me and decide to take a punt. When the article came in it was dry, clunky and badly written, but after several rounds of editing they managed to get it into a publishable state. It went online in June and was up until yesterday when it became clear they (and I) had been scammed. […] The whole thing makes me feel sick. I know from my work as an editor that the reputational damage is real. Had I pitched a story to them afterwards they would very understandably have said “Hell no!”. Who has the time to do someone else’s job? They tried “me”, “I” didn’t deliver, so no thank you.
I have no idea how many more editors out there have me on their ‘do not commission’ list because of this person’s actions. There may also be several scientists who will not want to talk to me because they’ve had a bad experience with the fake one.
More broadly, if this is a wider scam (and based on what others have told me, I think it is), it is potentially a serious issue for science journalism and journalism in general. And I’m not sure what we can do about that.
Science has retracted the fraudulent story.
I’m curious about this one, legal repercussions against the perpetrator seem pretty clearly viable (it would seem to me that Science has a viable fraud case, and Williams for probably a few too). why wouldn’t anyone do that? is that not the done thing in academia?
the network effects of reputational damage are pretty oof though :|
this shit should be regulated into the dustbin of history. relatedly, the recent release of unredacted docs from the NYT vs OpenAI case showing the clear knowledge of theft and substitution… it’s all willingly done
Although no specific errors in this story have so far been identified
Well here’s the very start of the retracted article:
On the screen, two side-by-side squares of color flicker rapidly
Except oops it was referring to a study that used groups of moving dots rather than “squares”. This can be seen in that studies first figure. Bam. A specific error in the first sentence…
(Am I being too pedantic?)
