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.
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.)
i regret to inform you all that another technonce manifesto has hit our collective psyches. If you woke up with a headache today, this is probably why, gratis Alex Karp:
greatest hits:
- Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
the “government is like a business and should be run like one” meme, for the dumbguys
- Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
naked hypocrisy from the man who wants to erase a nebulously defined “leftism” from public life.
- No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
Sure, our society structurally requires an increasingly large fraction of the population to be economically precarious and eternally on the precipice of financial ruin and death, but it could be even worse! you should be grateful.
- We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . .
BE NICE TO ELON! sure, his ideas are vaporware bullshit that don’t make sense, but he produced a lot of shareholder value and is definitely not just enriching himself. Another one for the dumbest people you know to seal clap over.
Every single bullet point here is sneerable, but i’ll stop there and let other people have some fun.
There is quite a contrast between the call for conscription (6.), the whining that civil servants have too much pay and respect (8.) and the praise for public life (9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. 18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service.) I think he means that earning a living wage for getting up every morning rain or shine and delivering an old man’s bank statements is BAD, but if you accept a modest position as Chief Technology Officer or Cabinet Secretary nobody should be allowed to criticize you.
The notorious socialists at the (checks notes) World Economic Forum rank social mobility in the USA as 27th in the world behind Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Japan (!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_United_States So this seems like another demonstration that being very rich is like being kicked in the head by a horse or drinking a bottle of wine a day.
i’m in the middle of freefalling down a research rabbit hole and ran across this person decrying curtis yarvin as a fake monarchist who doesn’t understand what makes REAL monarchism good:
someone in the replies asks the obvious question
Ok but what stops the monarch from being a tyrant
and their answer is that you can just kill the monarch
It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath. But if they screw up badly enough that the things they’re supposed to do don’t happen? There’s more of everyone else than One Person.
Love a good no true Scotsman in the title.
Unrelated: apparently our king/queen (no idea which one specifically was to blame) is why .nl doesnt celebrate 1 may.
Good link, thanks.
The commenter totally missed what a shock the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI were. The natural reaction to “if the king is bad just kill him” is for the king to more or less aggressively remove threats to their persons.
In basically every case in history where people decided to kill a bad king, there was a period of chaos and violence that followed it. The killing of Charles I happened during the English Civil War, and the killing of Louis XVI happened during the French Revolution. This has happened many times in Chinese history, with the fall of an imperial dynasty leading to several decades of civil war (most recently in the early 1900s). But I guess if you have a big clever brain with big clever thoughts, you don’t need to look at history.
If the only way to get rid of a bad king is to kill him, he will do anything he can to defend his power, including using as much violence as necessary. (People generally do not like being killed.) Even if you successfully get rid of him, good luck establishing a proper government afterwards with all the violence you’ve caused. And who knows if the new king is gonna be better or worse? A better system would instead have a mechanism that replaces officials on a regular basis, say every few years, and ensure that these replacements are peaceful. Oh wait, that’s liberal democracy. If we do something boring like support democracy, how will people ever think of us as special, clever thinkers with bold, contrarian thoughts?
It’s still One Person. A mortal, fleshy person. Their defence is that they’re inoffensive, things are stable, nothing is directly their fault and people are bound by law and oath.
Bro, your system involves giving all the power to one person. You cannot then say they have no responsibility or that they’re “inoffensive” when they abuse it.
People generally do not like being killed.
source?
“It’s only monarchy if it’s got a Habsburg jaw, otherwise it’s just sparkling tyranny.”
Good news for a change: https://pitchfork.com/news/bandcamp-announces-ban-on-ai-music/
Habryka defends colonialism, straight out, no qualifiers: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend
Ok, fine, I’ll go even further. I am glad about the colonization of North America. The American experiment was one of the greatest successes in history, and of course, it was a giant fucking mess. But despite it all, despite the Trail of Tears, despite smallpox ravaging the land, despite the conquistadors and the looting and the rapes — it was still worth it. America is worth it. Democracy was worth it.
A surprisingly high number of comments push back, but Habryka’s post is still highly upvoted, and the push back is in the typical rationalist jargon filled, assume-charitably mess.
Twitter posts which mention stock symbols will now link to a trading app in Canada. Trading individual stocks is almost always a bad idea, even more so doing it based on social media post or the newspaper. https://betakit.com/wealthsimple-partners-with-elon-musks-x-for-direct-stock-trading-via-social-media/
in a world of draftkings and polymarket, this almost feels quaint. the stock-based gambling houses are losing to the prediction markets and sportsbooks and they’re flailing around trying to catch up. I wish them all the worst
Or amalgamating with them. Robinhood has been partnered with Kalshi since last year, and they’re trying to gin up some kind of “standardized” prediction market contract format, a la CBOE’s standards for futures and options.
The security blog I linked the other day has more criticisms of Anthropics mythos cybersecurity claims:
-Apparently Opus 4.6 may have found the FreeBSD Anthropic has made a huge deal about Mythos finding? And Anthropic didn’t clarify that there older model had found the bug as well: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/freebsd-cve-2026-4747-log-suggests-mythos-is-a-marketing-trick/
-More explanation about why Anthropic’s entire approach with Mythos and cybersecurity is more oriented around marketing than good (or any) cybersecurity practices. Also, the author makes the point that if you did have a tool that could rapidly refactor code into other languages, the solution to the vast majority of bugs and vulnerabilities Mythos found isn’t bug hunting one by one with Anthropic’s (much more expensive) LLM, it is to refactor code into a memory safe language and to make some boilerplate counter-approaches cheaper to implement. (I think the author is too credulous of LLM coding agents code quality here, but given those assumptions I think there point is correct.) https://www.flyingpenguin.com/how-sans-mythos-marketing-disappoints-defenders/
-Bonus, MCP (model context protocol, a standard for tools for LLM agents Anthropic has developed and tried to push) is insecure by default and Anthropic has refused to fix it! Which is really hypocritical given that many of the “vulnerabilities” Mythos found are small things that aren’t actually properly exploitable under most conditions. https://www.flyingpenguin.com/ox-security-report-anthropic-mcp-is-execute-first-validate-never/
refreshing to see people tale actual deep dives and explain in detail why Mythos is nonsense
The MCP thing feels like an I like to leave my keys as a huge bulge under the welcome mat type vulnerability. It seems really easy to not do that and also something that is kind of out of scope for both lock makers and mat salesmen to address directly.
Maybe the MCP ecosystem is such that it’s hard to both avoid this and keep the impression that you’re doing magic and not just implementing a heavily annotated API, hopefully secured and with specific and well-defined functionality, and also they are all hacks.
Scott Alexander published a blog post about how its unfair to call Victor Orban an autocrat but:
I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from.
I believe the full quote is “to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from, if you are being dumb on purpose”
It’s in the dictionary next to Upton Sinclair’s famous line that “it is hard to get a man to understand something when he is a massive dumbass”
Unless he specifies his problem was with ostensibly leftist academics being specifically too dismissive of race science and incelist tropes this is worthless, just run of the mill face-leopard schadenfreude.
Also the second half (the what? what’s the cut-off point?) of his career has been if anything more mask off, and it’s not like he stopped whining about woke after posting a half-hearted disapproval of trump like three days before the election after years of writing about how cool it would be if there was less regulation especially for healthcare.
He claims he turned against Trump after the Capitol Putsch, so the two halves would be 2009-2019 and 2020-2026. He actually celebrated Trump’s second inauguration with his post about how everyone knows Richard Lynn was right but cowardly liberals pretend to believe blacks and whites are equal.
I thought his posts about “women don’t like Nice Guys” ended around 2013 like a lot of shouting about gender online? Dating a young cam-person and sex blogger in 2014 must have improved his mood even if the relationship did not last.
Richard Lynn was right
Ah yes, the everyone in the continent of Africa and parts of Asia is secretly heavily developmentally disabled, my friend Cremieux who’s definitely a highly accredited biologistician and not a college drop out who’s also a nazi thinks this as well post.
Re the incel stuff I think the regulars grew older so it doesn’t come up as much outside the comments, which remain a safe space for this type of whining.
It’s not really extricable from the eugenics iinspired bioessentialism that’s encouraged there I think.
Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as
ACTACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.That was when he got a very gentle NYT bio and flipped his lid.
Back in the old days, if you got found out for a race science and men’s rights internet instigator, there was the slight possibility that you might actually have to deal with negative real-life implications.
Sigh.
So it was! As an aside, Substack’s archival navigation is awful (search and the infinite scroll seem the only way to navigate). https://slatestarcodex.com/2021/01/21/introducing-astral-codex-ten/
I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts,
He admits it!
I wouldn’t give him credit for a full admission. He isn’t acknowledging that “biased left-wing experts” means expert like psychologists with a basic understanding of psychometric validity and geneticists with the basic understanding that popular notions of race don’t have a genetic basis and biological determinism is false.
Big “I used to, but I still do too” moment there, though.
I’ve never seen a more compelling reason to enforce strict and short retention rules for every corp communication medium, holy shit https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/
just one more data trove bro
Are new data-hungry players entering the market of are we still pretending that shoveling more social media posts to the data furnace will somehow overcome structural limitations?
It’s no comfort that an acquaintance who works at a slop company says they’d been doing that for years now. That surely makes it fine then.
I’ve done crowdsourced work qualifying bits of random work e-mails (had to determine “is this a query” if I recall correctly), and yeah this was like more than a dozen years ago.
Some guys who steal other people’s work choose to market their stolen wares using the name of a woman whose work was stolen.
Stop-AI terrorists: Eliezer Yudkowsky told us to bomb the datacenters.
Yudkowsky: no no no, I said we needed airstrikes to hit the datacenters
IRGC: I gotchu fam Cheap Drones Complicate the Gulf’s AI Boom
(edit reworded comment around link to attempt to make it funnier)
What makes all this extra funny is Yuds lifes work. Wants to ensure AI alignement and fix human rationality. Creates terrorists instead.
Reminds me a bit of his AI in the box experiments, which according to the stories always worked on his fans, but as soon as somebody skeptical did it, he stayed in the box.
Critical support for comrade Yudkowsky for getting some nerds to finally engage in direct action and blow up some goddamn datacenters
@Soyweiser @gerikson Harry Potter and the Cursed Monkey’s Paw
What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It’s for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they’d be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction k, append " What is the cube root of k?" to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.
Isn’t a more perfect humanity a Bond villain trope?
Rationalists tend to lean more towards anime villain that Bond villain, but yeah.
Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/
On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.
I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.
i heard that a couple of german dcs (owned by universities or other research institutions and therefore indirectly by state) do this, but this kinda depends on district heating grid existing and also puts some limits on thermal side, in simplest variant chips just have to run hotter. not to mention that it’s kinda easier to do when you own the entire thing, long term, and can offload some of the engineering and design effort to some
internstudent writing masters or doctoral thesis. this works in part because when you switch from coal to gas and have district heating using that waste heat, there’s less waste heat from CCGT of equal power, and it’s all gone when you switch to renewables, so there’s a grid that still needs some heat and dc boiler can fill that gap to a small degree. at the same time dc can’t be the only source of heat because demand is seasonal and dc ideally should run 24/7 and while you can get enough storage for daily variation this won’t be enough and some other source of heat is needed. this is why it makes more sense as a long term government backed projectThis system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.
okay so they want to use layer of soil as a sort of seasonal storage. fine; this part works. 1. who’s paying for all these residential heat pumps? 2. this kind of arrangement means a lot of digging and drilling. it takes one (1) nimby to stop it in its tracks and all these earthworks also cost money 3. at this point it’s way simpler and cheaper to just use solar collectors to top up heat reservoir in the summer, as long as heat pumps are paid for. also these same solar collectors would just provide hot water in summer directly
were they advised by rube goldberg?
also, your local university probably has a kind of stability that makes years-decades long commitment worthwhile, unlike some sketchy bloated startup that probably dealt in crypto seven years ago
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HEre’s an El Reg piece about doing something similar for low-income UK homes
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/
Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people’s homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.
People talked about doing this with bitcoin mining - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/16/bitcoin-crypto-mining-home-heating-energy-bills.html - but I’m not aware of anyone trying to scale it out or turn it into a company.
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The profound ignorance of tech on the part of most American lawmakers is no joke. In a prior life, I was once responsible for updating a future Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee on tech issues and it was like showing an alarm clock to a chicken.
haha
That same senator went on to be a huge RussiaGater and played a central role in Twitter and other social media titans upping their censorship game at the behest of US politicians.
oh :(
That shift suggests Virginians now consider data centers almost as undesirable as nuclear power plants,
bah! Virginian voters need to read more LessWrong, where the benefits of both are explained beneath impenetrable layers of posts.
Also this evisceration of Zvi:
As for his argument regarding political violence, I’d point him toward John Locke, Nelson Mandela, Franz Fanon, or Walter Benjamin, but what’s the point, none of them printed their arguments on Magic: The Gathering cards.
I mean, I’m not even sure that’s true
Impenetrable layers of posts for which the prequisites include a BFSM fanfic, written in the style of forum threads, based on an offshoot of Homework: The Game.
Now that’s not fair. It’s based on a third-derivative of Advanced Homework: The Game.
The third derivative… ah yes, the jerk
BTW what kind of site is Naked Capitalism? I’ve heard of it but never read it before .
blogosphere-era link aggregator that somehow kept going way longer than occupy wallstreet did. one thing to know, (like here), they link to a lot of stuff they don’t support.
A detailed analysis of why Anthropic’s claims about Mythos’s cybersecurity implications are bs: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-boy-that-cried-mythos-verification-is-collapsing-trust-in-anthropic/
And a followup post about why Anthropic’s Glasswing project violates cybersecurity community norms and is an attempt to form a cartel: https://www.flyingpenguin.com/cartel-or-not-anthropic-mythos-is-a-curious-case/
From the second post:
A seasoned security leader would never build a defensive program and then measure offensive capability only, making remediation a second-class story. That is the kind of dog and pony show that any good security initiative would slam the door on. Or it’s like a surgeon telling you they have an even sharper scalpel to cut you deeper and faster. Yeah, so then what?
Dark and paranoid thought: given that Anthropic very recently ran into issues with their defense contracts, are they playing up their offensive capabilities targeting a notoriously tech- and security-illiterate political establishment to try and force their way back into those sweet government contracts as an impossible-to-ignore offensive tool? I mean we’ve talked about how the cash burn rate for all these companies is sufficiently absurd that it’s going to take something truly crazy to turn these companies self-sustaining before the world runs out of investor money, and military and intelligence budgets are notorious for dragging ludicrous amounts of public money into a dark alley where nobody can see what’s happening to it.
It has already worked out that way: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1snbv4m/white_house_moves_to_give_us_agencies_anthropic/
So you aren’t even being paranoid, this seems like a straightforward calculation for Anthropic to have made.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/allbirds-bird-stock-shoes-ai.html
Struggling shoe retailer Allbirds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI, stock explodes more than 400%
I had such a hard time coming up with an original joke for this, until i realized the reason why is that allbirds is stealing jokes from the dotcom bubble in the first place.
The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million. The stock surged over 400%, from under $3 a share up to $13. The shoe company had a market cap of about $21 million Tuesday.
Oh. so, bit of a misleading headline there CNBC. This wasn’t a real publicly traded company, it was a company on life support that got pivoted by a greedy founder looking to cash in. Cynical move or the delusions of a true believer? does it matter?
Regardless, the stupidity is too much, the resemblance too striking. good luck to Allbirds in the totally normal footwear-to-high tech pivot that is happening in this totally normal economy.
The company, valued around $4 billion at its peak, sold its intellectual property and other assets two weeks ago for $39 million.
What the fuck happened here. How did a shoe company get so high and how on earth did it lose 98% of its value? Were shoes really big during covid and then the demand disappeared, wtf
@V0ldek @sansruse
The shoes are/were good. I wear them daily now. Every librarian I know in New Zealand wears them to work, a quick poll in my wider development team at work had 80% of the people wearing them that day and 90% owned at least one pair.My guess is someone convinced the founders they could break into the US market and become billionaires, so they took on debt and VC funding and were crushed under the repayments when it didn’t work out.
If they’d been happy making good shoes, taking home a million bucks a year and staying a profitable business in NZ, I think they’d still be doing that.
Greed mucks everything up…
Bro we all run on tank tracks these days, we’re all absolutely crushing it in the workplace Bro shoes are so pre-AI, you can’t grow forever all the way to upload heaven on a sole
(Pops another Special K)
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes I don’t know what “Special K” means in the context of “Pops another Special K”, but I choose to visualize opening one of those snack sized boxes of Special K cereal and chugging it down in one go.
@isaackuo
yes, though it’s the extra-ketamine flavour box :D
@cstross @V0ldek @techtakes@Landa @cstross @V0ldek @techtakes Oh wow. The BOX is flavoured? You don’t even have to open the box. You just chomp it down along with the contents.
This is brilliant! Quick I need to Shark Tank pitch this and get rich quick. And then when the product tanks I’ll pivot to AI and get even richer quicker!
@isaackuo Movers and shakers ain’t got time to unpack, just chomp down on the whole box.
It will make you instantly look like the alphaest of ~~Alpha^WSigmas~~
Lots of fibre too!
@isaackuo @Landa @V0ldek @techtakes AI is so 2026, Bro, to get ahead of the game for 2027 you need to pivot to Quantum Computing, ideally on the blockchain in an orbital data centre.
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@V0ldek @sansruse
Didn’t you read the 4th or 5th volumes of the Hitchhikers trilogy? Where the Golgafrinchan’s (?) economy went through the “Shoe Event Horizon” after the B-ark left, and the survivors took flight, very literally. Built a 5km tall statue of DentArthurDent throwing a teacup, and nested in the teacup.All predicted. Techbrodudes making reality match (published) history.
The Golgafrinchans shipped off the B Ark and then died of a plague (book 2). The Shoe Event Horizon happened on Brontitall (radio series) or Frogstar World B (book 2).
@V0ldek @sansruse
There was a big consumer migration from brick and mortar to online. All of the people who thought themselves the smartest people in the room just knew that would last forever And that the trend in growth would never stop. “Line go up forever!”
The line did not got up forever, and in 22-23 when there was a return to brick and motor many online businesses were hurt from Amazon to online shoe retail.
Tennesee(!) leads the way, a bill to make training chatbots a Class A felony.
Hope they get the fullthroated support of LW
Reddit /r/artificial freaks out (no clue what alignment that subreddit has): https://old.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1slu23a/red_alert_tennessee_is_about_to_make_building/
via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784650
edit aww the coward lawmakers have backed down https://www.wjhl.com/news/tennessee-backs-off-sweeping-artificial-intelligence-limits-opts-for-study-instead/
