this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)

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[–] maol@awful.systems 23 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.

alt textA picture of a "no AI" symbol next to the Thomas House logo.

"So for the future (literally) we're not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.

We're right next to Ireland's biggest Art College, lads. It's not a good look.

We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and we'll get by again. If you're stuck, we'll help.

Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans."

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (5 children)

i'll just quote it straight because i can't make it any funnier:

maia arson crimew 🏴 ‪> @crimew.gay‬ SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members? I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.

https://bsky.app/profile/crimew.gay/post/3moejkbqctc2z

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago

We are good on opsec

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

Of course Ezra Klein is hanging out with the worst people in the world. He's always on the hunt for a new gutter to pick up some fetid idea and tart it up for liberals.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be...

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Wired has a story about Peter Thiel's Dialogue conference in Ireland. They chickened out of publishing the names who include Tim Urban, Tyler Cowen, Jonathan Haidt, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, "sitting Trump administration officials, two US senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia (hi Jaan! hi Peter! hi Elon!), a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country's largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies (hi Doktor Karp!)."

The same data lays out a program of off-the-record sessions, including: “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

...

Dialog also plays matchmaker. Its participant form asks registrants whether they are “looking for love” and offers to include “Single Man,” “Single Woman,” or “Other” respondents in “future matchmaking.” A separate site, dating.dialog.org, hosts an app pitched as “meaningful connections for exceptional people.”

So like a rationalist event, but the guests skew very rich not professional middle class.

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[–] samvines@awful.systems 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.

The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don't need to list them in this forum.

Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.

First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.

Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don't keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don't produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.

Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn't be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We're doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 20 points 1 month ago (2 children)

@samvines @techtakes It's also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

(If they'd led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

I also question the degree to which "the other 99% of readers" actually don't care about AI slop. Even outside the awful bubble here I see AI images get met with at best a weary sigh of "I guess this is the world now" rather than actual acceptance. And I know we've talked at some length about how gell-mann amnesia isn't a very useful model, but I think most people are much less tolerant of slop in areas that the know more about. Maybe I can't tell an slopware history paper from a real one, but historians certainly can, and they hate that shit. In that sense the "median reader" statistic is misleading because the median reader isn't particularly invested in most of what gets written anyways, and it's the lack of investment that makes slop seem plausible. Even the concerns about deep fakes seem like they're not separate from this general problem, since the same disconnection that makes people uncritically accept deep fakes makes them uncritically accept fake news without an accompanying video, or with a context-stripped video from an unrelated event, or whatever.

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

zitron got a scoop on openai: 8.8B loss in 2024, 60.3B loss in 2025, 1.17B from ms + softbank, promises more detailed analysis later https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

[–] samvines@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

So when sama suggested the financials would leak and people speculated that Zitron might have thema couple of weeks ago, they were bang on the money!

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

So he can't be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can't have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (7 children)

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

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This feels like yet another case of "what no postmodernism does to a mf". Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that's entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren't "abnormal" and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it's easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of "how do I help people be happy and successful" necessitates asking "how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person." Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can't really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he's a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don't listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

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[–] samvines@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Three scenes and a comment:

  1. Me sitting in the baking heat in my garden, thinking about my own anxiety about climate change (we currently have our 2nd once-in-a-thousand-years record-breaking heatwave in 2 weeks in Europe), food shortages, instability and genocide in the middle east and the rise of the far right across western democracy.

  2. I see another story: some AI bros posting about their "anxiety" about AI being the end of human labour and jobs whilst posing for selfies in their fancy digital nomad resort.

  3. I'm still sweating and scrolling from my garden... I see a quote about how we have to pick between the climate and AI...

We live in the dumbest and darkest timeline if we cannot collectively see the obvious course of action here. Social media, souped up by LLMs has collectively cooked our brains and hyper-segmented us into tiny echo chambers that don't have enough gravity to affect change. We need to break out of it

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[–] lurker@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

AGI’s ETA: Delayed (again) due to technical difficulties

came across this one when doomscrolling, pretty good article with healthy doses of skepticism. out of three commenters, one appears to be a rationalist (based off the “empirical evidence” and “instrumental convergence” they mention) who tries to argue that we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing, even though every single AI doom argument is about smart-as-a-human and better AIs. Just comes off as goalpost moving

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 10 points 1 month ago

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn't really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won't shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

The header image is gold.

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[–] samvines@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Whitehouse gives anthropic "just draw the rest of the fucking owl" energy over Fable:

Trump administration officials tell WIRED that if Anthropic wants to rerelease Fable 5, it will need to ensure the model's guardrails can't be circumvented. Security experts say that can't be done.

With this and the OpenAI stories over the last few days I've been enjoying some top shelf schadenfreude

[–] lurker@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago

The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Person bets big on polymarket to profit from the continuation of the Iran war, gets screwed out of his blood money by site-wide oracle scam, complains on reddit.

Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol (used to be a thing with smart contracts), which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes, and currently like 9 people hold over half the voting power, so yeah.

The future of finance and the future of information aggregation keep overlapping in the funniest ways.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oracle as in a confirmation of facts protocol

Amazing that on first glance it looks like a smart contract 'all done by code' thing, but then the reveals comes and it is just a few rich people again.

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

which in polymarket apparently amounts to token holders in an external DAO called UMA voting in proportion to their holdings to resolve disputes,

Wait that's even fucking dumber than I thought it was, good grief

Everything I've learnt about prediction casinos is against my will and all of it is somehow the dumbest shit imaginable. I went through crypto, NFTs, the metaverse, and 3 years of AI bullshit, and nothing reached this level of psychic damage before.

[–] DJDarren@mendeddrum.org 10 points 1 month ago

LB: Enormous fan of that chud griping in /r/CryptoCurrency of all places, and getting laughed at for falling victim to a scam.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)
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[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.

the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173

The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.

however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can't just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that's a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Congrats to lesswrong, another one of their big ideas has reached the mainstream. (And it is eugenics).

Skeet from motherjones "Some of the same billionaires who bankrolled AI now admit the technology could one day kill us all.

And they’re funding a new plan to stop it—genetically engineered genius babies."

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Has it been 2 months already? I was wondering when they would turn up in the news again.

E: I'm not serious, I came across this video on yt which fulfilled my 'every 2 months' thing already. It was actually a bit interesting, as it turns out both of them have a long mostly unscrubbed online history which they tracked down and analyzed, turns out she has a history of being a weird quirky person, and they both have an air of 'want to become internet famous/create an internet scam' sort of thing.

The comments on that vid are great as well (wait for it) check this one out:

It is rich for you to skewer anything Simone and Malcolm miss with their podcast when they post 5 days a week (you neglected to mention) and you can’t even maintain your schedule or throw up a post on bluesky when you are off schedule. Also, because you two are genetic dead ends you don’t know that a mother of 5 cannot be a night person, she was up with a baby when she emailed. Malcolm and Simone talk in different rooms because she always is looking after a baby, and babies can randomly make noise so Simone can mute and Malcolm can take over. Maybe you can meet a baby one day and learn how they work. But I will say this episode is better researched than the usual “read article titles and giggle” podcasts you put out.

This comment was left by none other than "Diana Fleischman" Yes, that one, the evolutionary psychologist, and partner of Primal "I'm no longer allowed near students" Poly (For those who remember sneerclub from reddit, he was a regular subject. For example).

Amazing how small this nazi nerd world is. And how bad they are at defending their own. Feel free to leave 'ad hominem' reactions to that. (I will not as my yt profile links back to my real life).

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Anthropic: Oh no! Our new model is too powerful! It's dangerously good!

US Government: okay then you can't export it or allow foreign nationals to access it

Anthropic: Wait not like that

We have reviewed a report that we believe is the basis of the government's directive and validated that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5), and is used every day by the defenders who keep systems safe.

Of course this has less to do with the actual capabilities of any model and more to do with Anthropic openly telling the Trump administration "no" on exactly one occasion, but we can still roast some marshmallows over this dumpster fire, right?

[–] lurker@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (4 children)

that the level of capability displayed there is widely available from other models (including OpenAI’s GPT-5.5)

please god let them block ChatGPT access like they did with Fable. it would be so fucking funny

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

A nice person develops a digital version of the Little Free Library for banned books. Hackernews spends a hundred (edit: three hundred) comments arguing over whether it would be better to share Nazi shit instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48547985

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)
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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

zitron's last podcast calls anthropic/openai top brass weirdos and cultists they are, describes their beliefs about building the machine god as bad philosophy and something that must go hard when you're 12 https://omny.fm/shows/better-offline/the-ai-industry-must-stop-doom-trolling-w-cal-newport

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[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Good News, Everyone! Longtime Dimes Square hangout Kiki's has been shut down - due to nonpayment of taxes (some allegations of wage theft too?)

[–] istewart@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

This situation is the first time I've become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki's. I'm gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

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[–] samvines@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Somewhat buried by EdZ's exposé... Nvidia trying to raise $21Bn with bonds this after Google raising money too...

Seems that even the mag 7 know the jig is nearly up and are trying to liquidate and get as much cold hard $$$ as they can now

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

NVIDIA bonds

Turns out your best ~~customer~~ debtor being one Cyprus GDP in the hole might actually lead to cashflow problems.

[–] veganes_hack@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

SpaceX is reportedly buying Cursor for 60 billion

not even sure what to even say to this tbh

edit: at first i thought the headline was a parody, or at least they meant to write million. but no, 60 BILLION. numbers don't mean anything anymore.

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. "VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE" "YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO" https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (5 children)

gwern:

I've been browsing /r/LessWrong for many years, due to having toggled on 'subscribe' and never quite getting around to leaving. I will be leaving shortly, but before I do:

I think this subreddit has gotten so bad over the years it should be shut down or rebooted with a new set of moderators.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/1uabnlx/proposal_shut_down_rlesswrong/

lol

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