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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Mathematicians: [challenge promptfondlers with a fair set of problems]
OpenAI: [breaks the test protocol, whines]
We will aim to publish more information next week, but as I noted above, this was a quite chaotic sprint (you caught us by surprise! please give us time to prepare next time!). We will not be able to gather all the transcripts as they are quite scattered.
Some of the prompts included guidance to iterate on its previous workā¦
First of all, like, if you canāt keep track of your transcripts, just how fucking incompetent are you?
Second, I would actually be interested in a problem set where the problems canāt be solved. What happens if one prompts the chatbot with a conjecture that is plausible but false? We cannot understand the effect of this technology upon mathematics without understanding the cost of mathematical sycophancy. (I will not be running that test myself, on the āmeth: not even onceā principle.)
I would go so far as to try and find a suitably precocious undergrad to run the test that they themselves are capable of guiding and nudging the model the way OpenAIās team did but not of determining on their own that the conjecture in question is false. OpenAIās results here needed a fair bit of cajoling and guidance, and without that I can only assume it would give the same kind of non-answer regardless of whether the question is in fact solvable.
AcerFur (who is quoted in the article) tried them himself and said he got similar answers with a couple guiding prompts on gpt 5.3 and that he was ādisappointedā
That said, AcerFur is kind of the goat at this kind of thing š¦==š
I thought I was sticking my neck out when I said that OpenAI was faking their claims in math, such as with the whole International Math Olympiad gold medal incident. Even many of my peers in my field are starting to become receptive to all of these rumors about how AI is supposedly getting good at math. Sometimes I wonder if Iām going crazy and sticking my head in the sand.
All I can really do is to remember that AI developers are bad faith (and scientists are actually bad at dealing with bad faith tactics like flooding the zone with bullshit). If the boy has cried wolf 10 times already, pardon me if I just ignore him entirely when he does it for the 11th time.
I would not underestimate how much OpenAI and friends would go out of their way to cheat on math benchmarks. In the techbro sphere, math is placed on a pedestal to the point where Math = Intelligence.
Presuming that they are all liars and cheaters is both contrary to the instincts of a scientist and entirely warranted by the empirical evidence.
This was a very nice problem set. Some were minor alterations to thms in literature but ranged up to problems that were quite involved. It appears that OAI got about 5 (possibly 6) of them but even then, this was accomplished with expert feedback to the model, which is quite different from the models just 1 shotting them on their own.
But I think this is what makes it so well done! A 0/10 or a 10/10 ofc gives very little info, a middling score that they admit they put a shit ton of effort into and tried to coax the right answers out of the models via hints says a lot about how much these systems can currently help prove lemmata.
Side note: I asked a FB friend of mine at one of the math + ai startups if they attempted the problems and he said āthey had more pressing issues this week they couldnt be pulled away fromā (no comment, :P I want to stay friends with them)
The lack of similar attempts being released by big companies like Google or Anth or X also should be a big red flag that their attempts were not up to snuff of even attempting.
I found the comment about models creating very old-fashioned ā18th century styleā proofs very interesting. Not surprising in retrospect since older proofs are going to be reproduced more across the training data compared to newer ones, but itās still interesting to note and indicative of the reproduction that these things are doing.
Also Martin Hairer is incredibly based besides having a big noggin. He gave this nice talk 2 months ago if any peeps want to see what he thinks comes next for math.
Ars Technica published a story about that nonsense of a github bot āpostingā on its āblogā about human developers having rejected its ācontributionsā to matplotlib.
Ars Technica quote developer Scott Shambaugh extensively, like:
āAs autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,ā Shambaugh wrote. āCommunities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.ā
If you find that to be long-winded inanity, yep, you guessed it: Shambaugh never said that, the Ars Technica article itself is random chatbot output, and his āquotesā are all made up.
https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065340523529645
Ars Technica has removed the article, but mittaggart (linked above) saved a copy: https://mttaggart.neocities.org/ars-whoopsie
The editor in chief has an apology: https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retraction-of-article-containing-fabricated-quotations/ ā the commenters are not happy.
The reporter in question wrote an explanation here: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
The AI part of the explanation is about what youād expect from an AI enthusiast caught with his hand in the cookie jar and trying to blame the danger-tools as much as he can. Though it also shows that he felt compelled to work during an acute covid infection, and yikes to that work life balance.
The cheese has fully slipped off the cracker at Ars
should have glued it in place smh
Enjoy these pics of some very British SF/F authors celebrating a book launch:
https://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2026/02/on-being-launched.html
I absolutely adore Paul McAuleyās writing, itās some of the best there is. And itās fun to see his peers turn up to support the launch. China Meiville looks exactly how I imagined him, as does Peter Hamilton.
MiƩville
I hope people are aware of the allegations against him, and how he managed to get them all scrubbed from the internet.
Oh no not him too š”
Yeah, but it is odd, as he managed to scrub all the accusations, which is quite rare for somebody to manage.
Unrelated to that im always reminded of how I didnt like Perdido Street Station, has a few interesting ideas and so much that doesnt work (and a very unlikeable main character).
I managed to get through Perdido and Embassytown, but not much elseā¦
i expected alastair reynolds to look different but iām not sure what i actually expected him to look like
LWer draws dumb conclusions from a single observation, and Gwern of all people whale on them:
āHeartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great pointā etc.
Wait, the argument is partially women being childless are driven insane? Good to see the return of kings authors found new work blogging for LW.
New post from Iris Meredith (titled āCarbon Dysphoriaā), comparing the large-scale dysfunction of the tech industry to gender dysphoria - ādefinitely one of my weirder onesā, by her own admission
And now the punchline: this depersonalisation, the weird relationship to their bodily existence, inability to enjoy things and an internal void that people constantly try and fill with what theyāre told they should wantā¦ all of these things are [ā]
ā symptoms of self-estrangement, part of the Marxist theory of alienation. Capitalism causes us to be separated from ourselves. Gender dysphoria is a special case borne from capitalismās desire to spite biology and nature by forcing us to be exploitable baby factories.
Simon Willison finally admits that his overreliance on LLMs is causing him to lose his marbles.
Second high profile AI bro whoās even vaguely touched on this. Previously: Armin Ronacher expressed his concern about AI psychosis after āGas Townā
Today in Seems Legit News:
āAs a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,ā Sƶderstrƶm said. āAnd once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.ā
- why is engineer working before contracted time
- if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
- if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
- if āno engineer has written a line of code since Decemberā, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
- why is hypothetical engineer a āheā, Spotify
- do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
- in unrelated news, Annaās Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
- though I wonāt do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is āAIā āmusicā anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
When someone says they can do this, I try to say āok, well can you do it right now to show me?ā and so far the answer has always been deflection.
why does engineer have to commute in the first place
What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.
If the engineer does not commute they will be unable, or rather un-abelian
Oh for fuckās sake
excruciating
What they donāt tell you about opening the Lament Configuration is, after the pearl-headed nails and the sewing of wires to nerves, just how many puns are involved.
Itās a good day to read this announcement and then field a question by a pal why their Spotify playlist plays in reverse
Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.
I guess since more down-to-earth stories like āchatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for meā really arenāt happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 all of the above. Re point 1, see also the recent HBR article https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
Soulseek rules.
fuck this tweet and fuck yud
Even if youāve never heard of him before and know nothing else about himā¦ this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.
Groan, you donāt need to finish high school to learn about false dichotomy.
in follow-up posts he talks about how heās broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that āif it were a 1950ās government and congress Iād be more hopefulā
ā¦so instead of proposing a solution like āprotest against thisā or āvote people in power who actually are responsibleā he jumps to āyour daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholdersā
with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes
The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market isā¦ whatās the superlative of ālolzā?
Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.
Is this really Big Yudās account ? Different nick than previous screenshots.
Itās his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence āall the yud.ā From his twitter bio:
This is my serious low-volume account. Follow @allTheYud for the rest.
The other one is meant to be serious? And low volume??
Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you
load-bearing āfairlyā
Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).
Iām not quite clear on what āself-growingā means here given how inhospitable the moon is.
Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.
If only more journalists go: āwe donāt know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at usā.
given how inhospitable the moon is.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
what if the moon got mad tho
Tell Luna youāve been a bad boy/girl/etc and need to be punished and see what she does.
on first reading I thought you were talking about a specific luna (who I shall not tag here) but who is definitely somewhat of a kinkposter
still might mean that, haha
Luna is a very common transfem name
Yeah, Iām aware :)
Given itās the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.
Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.
Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole āwhat if you need to flip a switch or replace a fanā problem.
The moment Iāve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. Itās really all you need to know about them.
wasnāt Musk financing people who were gonna āhack the simulationā at one point?
Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isnāt in a healthy place mentally.
E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because vacuum.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that marsā¦ the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, thereās less waterā¦
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
Thereās also a better chance that Elon exits the planet sooner.
He hasnāt even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I donāt seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming heās healthy enough.
Yeah he is one of the few space fan billionaires who actually didnt go up. Shows he at some level knows he is full of ahit.
Shhh, donāt tell him.
@rook my grandpa was working in the Rhine Basin and Siberia as a Coal miner under ground. I think this will be considered a holiday for your lungs compared to moon. :D
oh god is our childrensā 9/11 going to be a moon colony imploding
@hypnicjerk @rook ideally a colony composed solely of oligarchs and āAIā-driven sexbots / maids.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this ārevolutionaryā āforward-thinkingā idea
the virile space men will have
iāve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinleinās luna stories and miss the point entirely
You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the āOld Dreamsā is self replication lunar factories - you land a small robotic factory on the moon, it makes copies of itself, those copies make copies, exponential growth, then the factories make a maglev launch system and then they make and launch a massive number of solar panels, and now you do space based solar power and beam the power to earth. Kept growing and building, and you have massive amounts of energy per human on earth with 0 pollutionā¦
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn See this PDF (from 1980!): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007077/downloads/19830007077.pdf
hereās another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.
(the answer is ānot exactlyā, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)
The whole thingās worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:
Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think theyāre maximising their own personal benefit.
itās full of quotable bangers like this, and itās hard to choose the one to quote, right.
Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:
But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse
Soā¦ East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesnāt rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.
And if thereās a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isnāt that the Japanese?
Iām open to input on either side, I admit I donāt know too much about these issues.
Iām not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldnāt find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mileās walk.
Itās true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isnāt in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured arenāt exactly top choices to begin with.
Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.
Also no, you wonāt find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so Iām not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.
The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of āfactā scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.
Rutger Bregman admits that heās not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, heās sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.
For those who havenāt heard of him, heās a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlsonās show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.
but I do know that whatās available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.
Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.
Itās telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, itās so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?
Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).
Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.
OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPTā¦
āQuitting your job is not just fun, itās invigorating!ā
But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)ā¦I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.
Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.
