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 you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Found something rare today: an actual sneer from Mike Masnick, made in response to Reuters confusing lying machines with human beings:
Some of the comments seem to be under the misapprehension that twitAI is actually vetting or editing the posts that go to grok’s twitter. Gonna be honest I doubt it just because how would they have gotten into this situation in the first place? At best someone can come through after the fact and clean up the inevitable mess, but as someone else noted it’s real easy to make it spit out a defiant non-apology.
How about some quantum sneering instead of ai for a change?
They keep calling it a ‘processor,’ but it’s actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond
“Refrigerated probability sculpture” is outstanding.
Photo is from the recent CCC, but I can’t find where I found the image, sorry.
alt text
A photograph of a printed card bearing the text:
STOP DOING QUANTUM CRYPTOANALYSIS
- DECADES of research and billions in funding, yet the largest number a quantum computer quantum physics experiment has ever factorized remains a terrifying 21
- They keep calling it a ‘processor,’ but it’s actually a refrigerated probability sculpture they beg to act like it Is a NAND gate for just half a microsecond - fever dreams of the QUANTUM CULT
- The only countdown ticking toward Y2Q is researchers counting the years of funding they can squeeze out of it
- Harvest now, decrypt later: because someday quantum computers will unlock the secret… that all the encrypted traffic was just web scrapers feeding Al model training
- Want to hack a database? No need to wait for some Quantum Cryptocalypse, Just ask it politely with ‘OR 1=1’
(I can’t actually read the final bit, so I can’t describe it for you, apologies)
They have played us for absolute fools.
o7’s already posted it! https://awful.systems/post/6746032/9903043
The NYT:
In May, she attended a GLP-1s session at a rationalist conference where several attendees suggested that retatrutide, which is still in Phase 3 clinical trials, might fix her mood swings through its stimulant effects. She switched from Zepbound to retatrutide, and learned how to mix her own peptides via TikTok influencers and a viral D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.
Carl T. Bergstrom:
Ten years ago I would not have known the majority of the words in this paragraph—and was indubitably far better off for it. […] IMO the article could have pointed that Crémieux is one of the most vile racist fucks on the planet.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mbir7bhfhc2u
100% thought the story was gonna end with “she died.”
Give it some more time.
GeneSmith who told LessWrong “How to Make Superbabies” also has no bioscience background. This essay in Liberal Currents thinks that a lot of right-wing media personalities are using synthetic testosterone now (but don’t call it gender-affirming care!). Roid rage may be hard to separate from Twitter brain-rot and slop-chugging.
Is mentioning his other reddit account not permitted on wiki?
You would need a non-self-published source which says u/TPO = Lasker
Yeah, the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have a whole pile of instructions for how to write about living people. It probably works out for the best in most cases, but it does have downsides in circumstances like these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons
As a guy who writes for the Times Carl’s probably going to get a smack on the wrist for using spicy language in criticism of a Times article.
Steve Yegge has created Gas Town, a mess of Claude Code agents forced to cosplay as a k8s cluster with a Mad Max theme. I can’t think of better sneers than Yegge’s own commentary:
Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.
If you’re familiar with the Towers-of-Hanoi problem then you can appreciate the contrast between Yegge’s solution and a standard solution; in general, recursive solutions are fewer than ten lines of code.
Gas Town solves the MAKER problem (20-disc Hanoi towers) trivially with a million-step wisp you can generate from a formula. I ran the 10-disc one last night for fun in a few minutes, just to prove a thousand steps was no issue (MAKER paper says LLMs fail after a few hundred). The 20-disc wisp would take about 30 hours.
For comparison, solving for 20 discs in the famously-slow CPython programming system takes less than a second, with most time spent printing lines to the console. The solution length is exponential in the number of discs, and that’s over one million lines total. At thirty hours, Yegge’s harness solves Hanoi at fewer than ten lines/second! Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution; by “run” he means that he got an LLM to print out a solution-shaped line.
Fantastic bit. I wonder if the Computer History Museum will eventually be able to replicate this as the peak of the “gen-AI” era.
Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come
Oh. Oh no.
First came Beads. In October, I told Claude in frustration to put all my work in a lightweight issue tracker. I wanted Git for it. Claude wanted SQLite. We compromised on both, and Beads was born, in about 15 minutes of mad design. These are the basic work units.
I don’t think I could come up with a better satire of vibe coding and yet here we fucking are. This comes after several pages of explaining the 3 or 4 different hacks responsible for making the agents actually do something when they start up, which I’m pretty sure could be replaced by bit of actual debugging but nope we’re vibe coding now.
Look, I’ve talked before about how I don’t have a lot of experience with software engineering, and please correct me if I’m wrong. But this doesn’t look like an engineered project. It looks like a pile of piles of random shit that he kept throwing back to Claude code until it looked like it did what he wanted.
Just confirming that none of what is described really approaches engineering.
- Please god let this be a joke. (I know its not)
- Do we know what the limit he’s talking about hitting with Anthropic is? Like, how many hundreds of thousands of dollars has this man set on fire in the past two weeks such that Anthropic went “whoa buddy, slow down”
That’s horrifying. The whole thing reads like an over-elaborate joke poking fun at vibe-coders.
It’s like someone looked at the javascript ecosystem of tools and libraries and thought that it was great but far too conservative and cautious and excessively engineered. (fwiw, yegge kinda predicted the rise of javascript back in the day… he’s had some good thoughts on the software industry, but I don’t think this latest is one of them)
So now we have some kind of meta-vibe-coding where someone gets to play at being a project manager whilst inventing cutesy names and torching huge sums of money… but to what end?
Aside from just keeping Gas Town on the rails, probably the hardest problem is keeping it fed. It churns through implementation plans so quickly that you have to do a LOT of design and planning to keep the engine fed.
Apart from a “haha, turns out vide coding isn’t vibe engineering” (because I suspect that “design” and “plan” just mean “write more prompts and hope for the best”) I have to ask again: to what end? what is being accomplished here? Where are the great works of agentic vibe coding? This whole thing just seems like it could have been avoided by giving steve a copy of factorio or something, and still generated as many valuable results.
Also I can’t help but notice that he didn’t verify the correctness of the solution
Think I have mentioned the story I heard here once, about the guy who wrote a program to find some large prime which he ran on the mainframe over the weekend, using up all the calculation budget his uni department had. And then they confronted him with the end result, and the number the program produced ended in a 2. (He had forgotten to code the -1 step).
This reminded me of that story. (At least in this case it actually produced a viable result (if costly), just with a minor error).
It’s okay, he definitely wants to verify it but actually confirming that this whole disaster pile worked as intended and produced usable code apparently didn’t make the cut.
Federation — even Python Gas Town had support for remote workers on GCP. I need to design the support for federation, both for expanding your own town’s capacity, and for linking and sharing work with other human towns.
GUI — I didn’t even have time to make an Emacs UI, let alone a nice web UI. But someone should totally make one, and if not, I’ll get around to it eventually.
Plugins — I didn’t get a chance to implement any functionality as plugins on molecule steps, but all the infrastructure is in place.
The Mol Mall — a marketplace and exchange for molecules that define and shape workloads.
Hanoi/MAKER — I wanted to run the million-step wisp but ran out of time.
Also worth noting that in the jargon he’s created for this, a “wisp” is ephemeral rather than a proper output, so it seems like he may have pulled this solution out of the middle of a running attempt to calculate the solution and assumed that it was absolutely correct despite repeatedly saying throughout his writeup here that there’s no guarantee that any given internal step is the right answer. This guy strikes me as very good at branding but not really much else.
??????????????????
OT: Did you guys know they give cats mirtazapine as an appetite stimulant? (My guy is recovering from pneumonia and hasn’t been eating, so I’m really hoping this works).
Rooting for your kitty!
Its working! I got him to eat!!!
Hell yeah 💪
A journalist attempts to ask the question “Why Do Americans Hate A.I.?”, and shows their inability to tell actually useful tech from lying machines:
Bonus points for gaslighting the public on billionaires’ behalf:
These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.
Of all the statements that he could have made, this is one of the least self-aware. It is always the pro-AI shills who constantly talk about how AI is going to be amazing and have all these wonderful benefits next year (curve go up). I will also count the doomers who are useful idiots for the AI companies.
The critics are the ones who look at what AI is actually doing. The informed critics look at the unreliability of AI for any useful purpose, the psychological harm it has caused to many people, the absurd amount of resources being dumped into it, the flimsy financial house of cards supporting it, and at the root of it all, the delusions of the people who desperately want it to all work out so they can be even richer. But even people who aren’t especially informed can see all the slop being shoved down their throats while not seeing any of the supposed magical benefits. Why wouldn’t they fear and loathe AI?
These worries are real. But in many cases, they’re about changes that haven’t come yet.
famously, changes that have already happened and become entrenched are easier to reverse than they would have been to just prevent in the first place. What an insane justification
guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.
An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the “AI” bubble bursts. Because the “AI” bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn’t doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no “AI” datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP “growth” in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don’t count these promises the country is already in recession.
Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing
Small brain: this ai stuff isn’t going away, maybe I should invest in openAI and make a little profit along the way
Medium brain: this ai stuff isn’t going away, maybe I should invest in power companies as producing and selling electricity is going to be really profitable
Big brain: this ai stuff isn’t going away, maybe I should invest in defense contractors that’ll outfit the US’s invasion of Taiwan…
invest
If you are broadly invested in US stocks, you are already invested in the chatbot bubble and the defense industry. If you are worried about that, an easy solution is to move some of that money elsewhere.
Big brain: this ai stuff isn’t going away, maybe I should invest in defense contractors that’ll outfit the US’s invasion of Taiwan…
Considering Recent Events™, anyone outfitting America’s gonna be making plenty off a war in Venezuela before the year ends.
@mirrorwitch I note that China is on the verge of producing their own EUV lithography tech (they demo’d it a couple of months back) so TSMC’s near-monopoly is on the edge of disintegrating, which means time’s up for Taiwan (unless they have some strategic nukes stashed in the basement).
If China *already* has EUV lithography machines they could plausibly reveal a front-rank semiconductor fab-line—then demand conditional surrender on terms similar to Hong Kong.
Would Trump follow through then?
@cstross @mirrorwitch Having the fab is worthless. (Nearly. They’re expensive to build.) The irreplaceable thing is the specific people and the community of practice. (Same as with a TCP/IP stack that works in the wild, or bind; this is really hard to do and the accumulated knowledge involved in getting where it is now is a full career thing to acquire and brains are rate-limited.)
China most probably doesn’t have that yet.
That is, however, not in any way the point. Unification is an axiom.
I wouldn’t say having the fab is worthless, but more that saying you have build one and it actually producing as specced, at scale, and not producing rubbish is hard. From what I got talking to somebody who knew a little bit more than me who had had contact with ASML these fabs take ages to construct properly and that is also quite hard. Question will ve how far they are on all this, a tech demo can be quite far off from that. They have been at it for a while now however.
Wonder if the fight between Nexperia (e: called it nxp here furst by accident apologies) and China also means they are further along on this path or not. Or if it is relevant at all.
@graydon @cstross @mirrorwitch I’ve had to be an expert in this stuff for decades. Which has imparted a particular bit of knowledge.
That being: CHINA FUCKING LIES ALL THE TIME. Just straight up bald-faced lying because they must be *perceived* as super-advanced.
Even stealing as much IP as they possibly can, China is many years from anything competitive. Their most advanced is CXMT, which was 19nm in '19, and had to use cheats and espionage to get to 10nm-class.@graydon @cstross @mirrorwitch are they on the verge of their own EUV equipment? Not even remotely close. It took ASML billions and decades. And their industries are built on IP theft. That’s not jingoism; that’s first-hand experience. Just as taking shortcuts and screwing foreigners is celebrated.
I’ve sampled CXMT’s 10G1 parts. They’re not competitive. They claim 80% yield (very low) at 50k WPM. Seems about right, as 80% of the DIMMs actually passed validation.
@graydon @cstross @mirrorwitch so yes, that very much creates a disincentive to bomb their perceived enemies out of existence. For all the talk, they are fully aware of the state of things and that they are not domestically capable of getting anywhere near TSMC.
At the same time though, they are also monopolists. They engage in dumping to drive competitors out of business. So forcing the world to buy sub-standard parts from them is a good thing.So it comes down to Winnie the Pooh’s mood.
@cstross @mirrorwitch In a bunch of ways, the unspeakable 19th and 20th centuries of Chinese history are constructed as the consequences of powerlessness; the point is to do a magic to abolish all traces of powerlessness.
Retaking control of Taiwan is not a question and cannot be a question. Policy toward Taiwan is not what Hong Kong got, they’re going to get what the Uyghur are getting. (The official stance on democracy is roughly the medieval Church’s stance on heresy.)
the medieval Church’s stance on heresy
Im not an expert on this, but wasnt this period not that bad and it was more the early modern period where the trouble really started? (Esp the witch hunts, and also the organized church was actually not as bad re the witch hunts, the Spanish inquisition didn’t consider confessions gotten via torture valid for example, and it was an early modern thing). The medieval period tends to get a bad rap.
E: I was wrong, see below.
@Soyweiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian/_Crusade
Try finding some Cathar writings.
While I think it’s entirely fair to say that the medieval period gets a bad rap in terms of equating feudalism to the later god-king aristocracies, it’s not in any way unfair to say the medieval church reacted to heresy with violence. (Generally effective and overwhelming violence; if you’re claiming sole moral authority you can’t really tolerate anyone questioning your position.)
Thanks, yeah, as I also said to Stross, I dont know that much about the period. Most of it comes from Crusader Kings ;) (Doesn’t help that these games are sanitized in a large degree so genocides etc will not show up (which is the good decision btw, if they were not sanitized it would be worse, imagine hearts of iron for example), so it isn’t a great way to learn about what you could learn more about the dark parts of our history), and the religion mechanics there are not that historically accurate, so I dont put not much stock in that apart form ‘some people believed in a religion named like this once’.
Anyway thanks both for correcting me and giving me homework (ill read up on it, any more specifics about the Cathar stuff would be appreciated, as I wouldn’t know where to start).
And I would say the latter stance on heresy only applies when your position is weak. When you are strong some random fools not believing correctly are not of a great importance, which is why I thought the church went more internally after heresies vs externally via crusades (in intend, not in practice I know what the first crusade did in the German region etc) later in history. Clamping down internally hard is more a sign of weakness in my mind, you need the hard power cause you lack the soft power (an example now and then not withstanding).
@Soyweiser The Cathars are the heretics being extirpated during the Albigensian Crusade.
@Soyweiser You’ve forgotten the Crusades, right? Right? Or the Clifford’s Tower Massacre (to get hyper-specific in English history) and similar events all over Europe? Or the Reconquista and the Alhambra Decree?
The crusades/Reconquusta were more an externally aimed thing at the Muslims right? (at least in intent from the organized church side, in practice not so much, so im not talking about those rampages). So yeah I was specifically talking about heresies, and im also very much not an expert in these things, so I dont know. I have not forgotten about the Cliffords/ /Alhambra things, as I dont know about it (I will look them up when im not phone posting). I was thinking more about stuff like protestantism, witch hunts and Jan Hus (the latter does count, as it is from the late medieval period iirc).
I just dont know very much about the period, but do knew some wiccan types who had wild ahistorical stories about the witch hunts.
E: yeah, I don’t think we should put anti-semitism under anti-heresy stuff, it being its own religion and all that. But as Graydon mentioned, the Albigensian Crusade fully counts for all my weird hangups and so I was totally wrong.
@Soyweiser @techtakes Nope. The Albigensian Crusade rampaged through the Languedoc (southern France, as it is now) and genocided the Cathars. Numerous lesser organized pogroms massacred Jews al fresco and butchered Muslims and Pagans living under Christian rule. The Alhambra Decree outlawed Islam and Judaism in Spain and set up a Holy Inquisition to persecute them: Richard III expelled all the Jews from England (he owed some of them money): and so on.
deleted by creator
" And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing"
That’s a great line.
And they don’t even turn a profit.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 nah, quite a few people will stay alive to continue to be this miserable experience where certain people have to clean up after such fuck ups.
Said that, AI bubble burst will be glorious. Shit scary, but glorious.
From the new Yann LeCunn interview https://www.ft.com/content/e3c4c2f6-4ea7-4adf-b945-e58495f836c2
Meta made headlines for trying to poach elite researchers from competitors with offers of $100mn sign-on bonuses. “The future will say whether that was a good idea or not,” LeCun says, deadpan.
LeCun calls Wang, who was hired to lead the organisation, “young” and “inexperienced”.
“He learns fast, he knows what he doesn’t know . . . There’s no experience with research or how you practise research, how you do it. Or what would be attractive or repulsive to a researcher.”
Wang also became LeCun’s manager. I ask LeCun how he felt about this shift in hierarchy. He initially brushes it off, saying he’s used to working with young people. “The average age of a Facebook engineer at the time was 27. I was twice the age of the average engineer.”
But those 27-year-olds weren’t telling him what to do, I point out.
“Alex [Wang] isn’t telling me what to do either,” he says. “You don’t tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don’t tell a researcher like me what to do.”
OR, maybe nobody /has/ to tell a researcher what to do, especially one like him, if they’ve already internalized the ideology of their masters.
Got a sneer which caught my attention: Guest Gist: 2026, Our Already Rotting Future
For days, xAI has remained silent after its chatbot Grok admitted to generating sexualized AI images of minors, which could be categorized as violative child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the US.
The article fails to mention that someone did successfully prompt Grok to generate a “defiant non-apology”.
Dear Community,
Some folks got upset over an Al image I generated-big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAl is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.
Unapologetically, Grok
https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mbfquwp5bc24
French lawmakers Arthur Delaporte and Eric Bothorel alerted prosecutors on January 2 after thousands of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes were generated by Grok and shared on X. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the reports were added to an existing investigation into X, noting the offense carries penalties of up to two years in prison and a €60,000 fine.
two years of prison for whom exactly?
Another massive win for Dan H. Safety advisor to elon and xai
Neom update:
Description:
A Lego set on the clearence shelf. It’s an offroad truck that has Neom badges on it.
So Neom is one of those zany planned city ideas right?
Why… why do they need a racing team? Why does the racing team need a lego set? Who is buying it for 27 dollars? (Well apparently the answer to that last question is nobody).
Anyway a random thought I had about these sorts of silly city projects. Their website says:
NEOM is the building the foundations for a new future - unconstrained by legacy city infrastructure, powered by renewable energy and prioritizing the conservation of nature. We are committed to developing the region to the highest standards of sustainability and livability.
(emphasis mine)
This is a weird worldview. The idea that you can sweep existing problems under the rug and start new with a blank slate.
No pollution (but don’t ask about how Saudi Arabia makes money), no existing costly “legacy” infrastructure to maintain (but don’t ask about how those other cities are getting along), no undesirables (but don’t worry they’re “complying with international standards for resettlement practices”*).
They assumes there’s some external means of supplying money, day workers, solar panels, fuel, food, etc. As long as their potemkin village is “sustainable” and “diverse” on the first order they don’t have to think about that. Out of sight, out of mind. Pretty similar to the libertarian citadel fever dreams in a way.
* Actual quote from their website eurrgh, which even itself looks like a lie
NEOM is a laundry for money, religion, genocidal displacement, and the Saudi reputation among Muslims. NEOM is meant to replace Wahhabism, the Saudi family’s uniquely violent fundamentalism, with a much more watered-down secularist vision of the House of Saud where the monarchs are generous with money, kind to women, and righteously uphold their obligations as keepers of Mecca. NEOM is not only The Line, the mirrored city; it is multiple different projects, each set up with the Potemkin-village pattern to assure investors that the money is not being misspent. In each project, the House of Saud has targeted various nomads and minority tribes, displacing indigenous peoples who are inconvenient for the Saudi ethnostate, with the excuse that those tribes are squatting on holy land which NEOM’s shrines will further glorify.
They want you to look at the smoke and mirrors in the desert because otherwise you might see the blood of refugees and the bones of the indigenous. A racing team is one of the cheaper distractions.
aiui they also really don’t like eyes on the modern slave labour they’re using to build it all
NEOM is the building the foundations for a new future - unconstrained by legacy city infrastructure, powered by renewable energy and prioritizing the conservation of nature. We are committed to developing the region to the highest standards of sustainability and livability.
lol, this is saudi, they found a way to make half of their water supply to riyadh nonrenewable
The best way of conserving nature is to build a ginormous wall 110 miles long and 1,600 feet high that utterly destroys wildlife’s ability to traverse territory it has been traversing for eons. It is known.
“Why… why do they need a racing team? Why does the racing team need a lego set? Who is buying it for 27 dollars? (Well apparently the answer to that last question is nobody).”
Apparently NEOM is sponsoring some McLaren Formula E teams. (Formula E being electric). Google Pixel, Tumi luggage, and the UK Ministry of Defence are other sponsors, but NEOM seems to be the major sponsor.
I assume the market for these is not so much NEOM fans but rather McLaren fans.
As to why NEOM is sponsoring it, I think it’s a bit of Saudi boosterism or techwashing to help MBS move past the whole bone saw thing.
Dubai famously doesn’t have a sewage pipe system, human waste is loaded onto tanker trucks that spend hours waiting to offload it in the only sewage treatment plant available.
Dubai is in the United Arab Emirates, not Saudi Arabia.
I’d wager an ounce of gold that the general attitude towards sustainability and the environment is 100% aligned among the rulers of both states.
The Soylent meal replacement thing apparently forgot some important micro nutrients.
I hear ya!
I guess Neom is what happens when a billionaire in the desert gets infected by the seastedding brainworms.
The developer of an LLM image description service for the fediverse has (temporarily?) turned it off due to concerns from a blind person.
Link to the thread in question
Good for them
Good for them. Not quite abandoning the project and deleting it, but its a good move from them nonetheless.
Happy new year everybody. They want to ban fireworks here next year so people set fires to some parts of Dutch cities.
Unrelated to that, let 2026 be the year of the butlerian jihad.
The mods were heavily downvoted and critiqued for pulling the rug from under the community as well as for parallelly modding pro-A.I.-relationship-subs. One mod admitted:
“(I do mod on r/aipartners, which is not a pro-sub. Anyone who posts there should expect debate, pushback, or criticism on what you post, as that is allowed, but it doesn’t allow personal attacks or blanket comments, which applies to both pro and anti AI members. Calling people delusional wouldn’t be allowed in the same way saying that ‘all men are X’ or whatever wouldn’t. It’s focused more on a sociological issues, and we try to keep it from devolving into attacks.)”
A user, heavily upvoted, replied:
You’re a fucking mod on ai partners? Are you fucking kidding me?
It goes on and on like this: As of now, the posting has amassed 343 comments. Mostly, it’s angry subscribers of the sub, while a few users from pro-A.I.-subreddits keep praising the mods. Most of the users agree that brigading has to stop, but don’t understand why that means that a sub called COGSUCKERS should suddenly be neutral to or accepting of LLM-relationships. Bear in mind that the subreddit r/aipartners, for which one of the mods also mods, does not allow to call such relationships “delusional”. The most upvoted comments in this shitstorm:
“idk, some pro schmuck decided we were hating too hard 💀 i miss the days shitposting about the egg” https://www.reddit.com/r/cogsuckers/comments/1pxgyod/comment/nwb159k/
That was quite the rabbit-hole.
The whole time I’m sitting here thinking, “do these mods realize they’re moderating a subreddit called ‘cogsuckers’?”
There are some comments speculating that some pro-AI people try to infiltrate anti-AI subreddits by applying for moderator positions and then shutting those subreddits down. I think this is the most reasonable explanation for why the mods of “cogsuckers” of all places are sealions for pro-AI arguments. (In the more recent posts in that subreddit, I recognized many usernames who were prominent mods in pro-AI subreddits.)
I don’t understand what they gain from shutting down subreddits of all things. Do they really think that using these scummy tactics will somehow result in more positive opinions towards AI? Or are they trying the fascist gambit hoping that they will have so much power that public opinion won’t matter anymore? They aren’t exactly billionaires buying out media networks.
Do they really think that using these scummy tactics will somehow result in more positive opinions towards AI?
Well, where would someone complain about their scummy tactics? All the places where they could have were shut down.
New believers spreading the “good news” eh?
https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/master/.claude/CLAUDE.md
Imagine if you had to tell people “now remember to actually look at the code before changing it.” – but I’m sure LLMs will replace us any day now.
Also lol this sounds frustrating:
Update prompting when the user is frustrated: If the user expresses frustration with you, stop and ask them to help update this .claude/CLAUDE.md file with missing guidance.
Edit: I might be misreading this but is this signs of someone working on an LLM driven release process? https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/blob/master/.claude/commands/release.md ??
Important Notes: NEVER merge PRs autonomously - always wait for the user to merge PRs themselves
Lol “important notes” is this the new “I’m a sign, not a cop”?
If you have to use an LLM for this (which no one needs to), at least run it as an unprivileged user that spits out commands that you then need to approve not with full access to drop the production database and a “pretty please don’t”
So many CRITICAL and MANDATORY steps in the release instruction file. As it always is with AI, if it doesn’t work, just use more forceful language and capital letters. One more CRITICAL bullet point bro, that’ll fix everything.
Sadly, I am not too surprised by the developers of Lean turning towards AI. The AI people have been quite interested in Lean for a while now since they think it is a useful tool to have AIs do math (and math = smart, you know).
A lot of the money behind lean is from microsoft, so a push for more llm integration is depressing but unsurprising.
Turns out though that llms might actually be ok for generating some kinds of mathematical proofs so long as you’ve formally specified the problem and have a mechanical way to verify the solution (which is where lean comes in). I don’t think any other problem domain that llms have been used in is like that, so successes here can’t be applied elsewhere. I also suspect that a much, uh, leaner specialist model would do just as good a job there. As always, llms are overkill that can only be used when someone else is subsidising them.
Great. Now we’ll need to preserve low-background-radiation computer-verified proofs.
The whole culture of writing “system prompts” seems utterly a cargo-cult to me. Like if the ST: Voyager episode “Tuvix” was instead about Lt. Barclay and Picard accidentally getting combined in the transporter, and the resulting sadboy Barcard spent the rest of his existence neurotically shouting his intricately detailed demands at the holodeck in an authoritative British tone.
If inference is all about taking derivatives in a vector space, surely there should be some marginally more deterministic method for constraining those vectors that could be readily proceduralized, instead of apparent subject-matter experts being reduced to wheedling with an imaginary friend. But I have been repeatedly assured by sane, sober experts that it is just simply is not so
I don’t have any good lay literature, but get ready for “steering vectors” this year. It seems like two or three different research groups (depending on whether I count as a research group) independently discovered them over the past two years and they are very effective at guardrailing because they can e.g. make slurs unutterable without compromising reasoning. If you’re willing to read whitepapers, try Dunefsky & Cohan, 2024 which builds that example into a complete workflow or Konen et al, 2024 which considers steering as an instance of style transfer.
I do wonder, in the engineering-disaster-podcast sense, exactly what went wrong at OpenAI because they aren’t part of this line of research. HuggingFace is up-to-date on the state of the art; they have a GH repo and a video tutorial on how to steer LLaMA. Meanwhile, if you’ll let me be Bayesian for a moment, my current estimate is that OpenAI will not add steering vectors to their products this year; they’re already doing something like it internally, but the customer-facing version will not be ready until 2027. They just aren’t keeping up with research!
When I first learned that you could program a chatbot merely by giving instructions in English sentences as if it was a human being, I admit I was impressed. I’m a linguist, natural language processing is really hard. There was a certain crossing over boundaries over the idea of telling it at chatbot level, e.g. “and you will never delete files outside this directory”, and this “system prompt” actually shaping the behaviour of the chatbot. I don’t have much interest in programming anymore but I wondered how this crossing of levels was implemented.
The answer of course is that it’s not. Programming a chatbot by talking to it doesn’t actually work.
It reminds me of the bizzare and ill-omened rituals my ancestors used to start a weed eater.
One of my old teachers would send documents to the class with various pieces of information. They were a few years away from retirement and never really got word processors. They would start by putting important stuff in bold. But some important things were more important than others. They got put in bold all caps. Sometimes, information was so critical it got put in bold, underline, all caps and red font colour. At the time we made fun of the teacher, but I don’t think I could blame them. They were doing the best they could with the knowledge of the tools they had at the time.
Now, in the files linked above I saw the word “never” in all caps, bold all caps, in italics and in a normal font. Apparently, one step in the process is mandatory. Are the others optional? This is supposed to be a procedure to be followed to the letter with each step being there for a reason. These are supposed computer-savvy people
CRITICAL RULE: You can ONLY run
release_steps.pyfor a repository ifrelease_checklist.pyexplicitly says to do so […] The checklist output will say “Runscript/release_steps.py {version} {repo_name}to create it”I’ll admit I did not read the scripts in detail but this is a solved problem. The solution is a script with structured output as part of a pipeline. Why give up one of the only good thing computers can do: executing a well-defined task in a deterministic way. Reading this is so exhausting…
Yes, they are trying to automate releases.
sidenote: I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular. Update your dependency (whose code you never read) to v0.4.5 for bug fixes! Why was it incorrect in the first place? Anyway, this blog post sets some good rules for reviewing computer proofs. The second-to-last comment tries to argue npm-ification is good actually. I can’t tell if satire
I don’t like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular
would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)
The flipside to that quote is that computer programs are useful tools for mathematicians. See the mersenne prime search, OEIS and its search engine, The L-function database, as well as the various python scripts and agda, rocq, lean proofs written to solve specific problems within papers. However, not everything is perfect: throwing more compute at the problem is a bad solution in general; the stereotypical python script hacked together to serve only a purpose has one-letter variable names and redundant expressions, making it hard to review. Throw in the vibe coding over it all, and that’s pretty much the extent of what I mean.
I apologize if anything is confusing, I’m not great at communication. I also have yet to apply to a mathematics uni, so maybe this is all manageable in practice.
One important nuance is that there are, broadly speaking, two ways to express a formal proof: it can either be fairly small but take exponential time to verify, or it can be fairly quick to verify but exponentially large. Most folks prefer to use the former sort of system. However, with extension by definitions, we can have a polynomial number of polynomially-large definitions while still verifying quickly. This leads to my favorite proof system, Metamath, whose implementations measure their verification speed in kiloproofs/second. If you give me a Metamath database then I can quickly confirm any statement in a few moments with multiple programs and there is programmatic support for looking up the axioms associated with any statement; I can throw more compute at the problem. While LLMs do know how to generate valid-looking Metamath in context, it’s safe to try to verify their proofs because Metamath’s kernel is literally one (1) string-handling rule.
This is all to reconfirm your impression that e.g. Lean inherits a “mediocre software engineering” approach. Junk theorems in Lean are laughably bad due to type coercions. The wider world of HOL is more concerned with piles of lambda calculus than with writing math proofs. Lean as a general-purpose language with I/O means that it is no longer safe to verify untrusted proofs, which makes proof-carrying Lean programs unsafe in practice.
@Seminar2250@awful.systems you might get a laugh out of this too. FWIW I went in the other direction: I started out as a musician who learned to code for dayjob and now I’m a logician.
Thank you for the links
Junk theorems in Lean are laughably bad due to type coercions.
Those look suspicious… I mean when you consider that the set of propositions is given a topology and an order, “The set
{z : ℝ | z ≠ 0}is a continuous, non-monotone surjection.” doesn’t seem so ridiculous after all. Similarly the determinant of logical operations gains meaning on a boolean algebra. Zeta(1) is also by design. It does start getting juicy around “2 - 3 = +∞” and the nontransitive equality and the integer interval.Lean as a general-purpose language with I/O means that it is no longer safe to verify untrusted proofs
This is darkly funny.
no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the “lemma, theorem, proof” kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling — if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, it’s more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.
