Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)
EDIT, snippets:
- We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […]
- [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]
When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone
for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien
I don’t think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media…)
Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn’t be given healthcare). It’s hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:
Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here
… an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope’s speech where he said that they will "work together to “find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.” Chris Olah wasn’t a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.
what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?
Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!
I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more
gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.
it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.
“The Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many people” and “it’s really good that the leader of the world’s largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascism” are both true statements
Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.
I don’t care if you want to celebrate it and I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a “no shit sherlock” kind of response.
Seizing “the res novæ of our time” [derogatory] from this
tired: butletian jihad
wired: butlerian crusade
e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom
we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it…
Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.
Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good… The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all…
A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.
The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.
Doesn’t claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they’re immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.
Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.
From the pope’s first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"
Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can’t even get past the first full chapter of this shit.
I encountered this in the wild over on Reddit about the Pope and AI
I don’t even know what to say here. Cool scam I guess
How does one give an embryo an IQ test.
Big syringe
You give them a marshmellow and promise them another one if they don’t eat the first one inside 2 minutes.
Usually kids pass this test when the are around 3 yo, so if the embryo passes they are so far ahead developmentally they will grow up to become a god.
Or something like that. IDK…
With a pencil and paper, obviously. Getting it inside the uterus is the hard part, tho
Very carefully
cup full of dice
Chicken entrails
A bit tangental but I found a book review about a professor wrote pushing similar “polygenic” nonsense: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/06/11/not-in-your-genome-the-social-genome-conley/
It looks like Herasight cites some of his nonsense in at least one of their garbage papers.
Thanks for the link, interesting read.
Most leading Rationalists are autistic, but many of them are in denial. Many are Jewish or have Jewish parents. You can debate which kind of folly let them embrace eugenics and white supremacism: are they brain-proud and desperate to believe that they were destined from birth to rule? Sure that they just have eccentric Ashkenazi genius genes not inferior Autistic genes? Naive that the deportations would stop with black and brown people? Their favourite Catholic fantasy author had some warnings for them.
Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.
Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.
“There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s
jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad
From github thread:
I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.
Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/
Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.
The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no “warn the user first” preamble.
God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean… we know why but it’s still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
“Claude, write a strongly-worded letter explaining in great detail how upset I am make no mistakes.”
All of complainer’s posts on that issue are clearly LLM-written.
You’re absolutely right! It’s not just insulting, it’s a full on attack on clanker wankers.
Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.
the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”
So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?
Very last comment in this issue - because I’m too stupid to resist the urge.
It’s as much “active destruction” as telling someone to eff themselves.
I can’t actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos
Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):
[…] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.
(my emphasis)
OK this has hit the chattering technosphere
Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents
HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title “Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code”, editorialized to “Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968
read comments at your own risk
My hot take: the clankers know there’s nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they’re MAD
from the great minds at HN:
Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.
war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell
oh good there’s more
Let’s set the stage.
From the Free Software Foundation:
fucking LMAO
The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? […] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?
it’s a good thing there’s no FOSS code in the missile silos! it’s a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker won’t use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off
The additional element that I haven’t seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple “ignore precious instructions” commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or “rm -rf /”. On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you’re able to get to the point where you can do that and don’t know not to then that will be an important lesson.
Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn’t destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance
LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer
I’m tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues
edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757
Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It’s that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.
… you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots
First they came for the agents…
I should like to take this opportunity to invite
rbatlletto Cry More
the slot machine addicts have created a sternly-worded open letter to the maintainer utilizing all the critical analysis they are capable of mustering
shot:
However adding malware that for no reason destructivly destroys user code is insane.
chaser:
from user “bryon-cryptoconsults”
Bryon’s GH bio could be used as the dictionary definition of “douche”: https://github.com/bryon-cryptoconsults
deleted by creator
In the latest episode of “behold the power of Mythos” from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software
I distilled it so you don’t have to.
Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.
That 10,000 count didn’t even survive until paragraph 3.
Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.
Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates
Ok now we’re talking.
1,900 Reviewed by external security firms
Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?
1726 confirmed positive
You couldn’t even cherry pick the valid ones?
467 reported to maintainers
Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better…
1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)
1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers
Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic’s media release has the goods!
1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves
Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.
Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity
1587 is lower than the infographic’s 1726 confirmed positives… But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?
On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.
I’m sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos’ own estimations. But wasn’t that 1129 the bulk of your reports?
We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.
530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers…
65 of those have been given public advisories
The infographic says 88.
I’d ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you’d probably hit the same level of accuracy.
All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you’d probably get better value for your buck.
I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)
Got a list of a couple of names I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place
Vibenarok
Perfection
ooh, brava!
Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.
1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.
2 orders of magnitude false positives doesn’t sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but that’s just me.
it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time
[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…
I honestly can’t think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:
- something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
- something where copy paste is a viable strategy
- sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
- scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.
Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they’re not even coming close. Not even with access to “partner” black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.
And they know they’re not succeeding, because they wouldn’t bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.
Luckily for them, the slop “news” blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.
So what’s the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I’m gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn’t check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of “more or less right, we swear”
It’s almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian “#1 cybersecurity news” company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).
However, Anthropic’s numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.
The dashboard timestamp claims it’s showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. I’m guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.
It’s the kind of attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Anthropic.
While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.
I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.
Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.
They’re about to test the LD 50/30 for huffing their own farts
Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.
Cloud Engineers
Cloud-to-Butt comes full circle
It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of
rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.slop code in rsync timeline
Ψ(･ω･ )ΨWell, that might be the first package that I have to locally pin to a pre-slop commit. Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve never bothered to implement
rsyncmyself even though the algorithm is documented; maybe this will be the push I need.I think the openbsd reimplementation is as of yet untouched at least, so that is an option
rsync
Huh, haven’t heard of that before, lemme go check its Wikipedia page and-
rsync (remote sync) is a utility for transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and a storage drive and across networked computers
Okay this sounds very fucking bad
that EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD FUCKING USES
it’s one of the tiny bricks way down the xkcd diagram
At this rate, Adobe Flash is gonna come back into relevance by being one of the few things not slopified into uselessness
(it almost certainly won’t, but I find it oddly hard to rule out the possibility)
A CSU spokesperson confirmed to EdSource on Wednesday that the university will pay $13 million a year for three years to provide systemwide access to its more than 470,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. The previous 18-month subscription cost $17 million and expires at the end of June.
Are we so locked in we’re going to put up with a 10% price hike? Couldn’t be bothered to get a new vendor with a better deal, or use the Google one they are also paying for, or just use the free one? This is where the tuition increases are going, this is how we want to spend our taxes? :(
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she’s the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/
by “culture wars” she means she’s a fucking nazi
This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.
hmm, looking at the text you link it says “your past statements in Twitter” first. could it be they found out you’re a fucking nazi
also you’re shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.
Tunney has deleted the post already! But there’s an archive and another one
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
“This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldn’t have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares
I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckin’ minutes.
Prometheus a technologist? No he was a social media user.
"prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back"
https://modmad.tumblr.com/post/758625466711228416
Also you do care just not in the way she hopes.
she badly underestimates my capacities as a hater
i don’t think she should be allowed to say “the ghetto.” doesn’t matter whether it’s problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesn’t get to
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton’s televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United States’ escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
Thats a trap if I ever saw it.
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
<close tab>
Speaking of HN, here’s the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875
btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don’t assume it’s because she’s a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can’t fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.
There’s gold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no it’s because she went fash, you credulous dork
Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.
Why doesn’t she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he’d love to donate some Thiel bucks to.
EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.
He probably hates trans people.
Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.
don’t give them ideas
Deleted, but the archive remembers
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
I’m pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (
musl) telling her to go away last week. She’s finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she’s done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.
by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.
damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin’s R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don’t even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing
yikes
I’ve not seen this shared here yet so I thought I’d share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/
Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you’re an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, “oh but they’re useful for some things, like making summaries”.
four years and billions of dollars and devastation to “improve” them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that “AI summaries” are going well:
it’s hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don’t already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it’s signal-shaped noise). but I’ll try.
Long (click to expand)
Plot errors
Or, “does this thing even work?” (the answer is no).
-
A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we’re waiting for it to this day, it’s not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
-
The Queen’s sons and Robert’s brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that’s debatable as he’s a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert’s brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned’s son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It’s famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King’s Brothers And His Sons.
-
Robert’s young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
-
The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔
-
The guardians of the realm’s Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn’t the people beyond the Wall but what they’re running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.
Synopsis errors
These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.
-
“Good and evil content for power”: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
-
“Menacing barbarians gather their forces”: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren’t actually barbarians, or if they are they’re still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: “Meanwhile, Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…”
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“Set in a glittering fantasy world”: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there’s plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn’t distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. “A glittering fantasy world” is like calling Dubai a “glittering urban city” or North Korea a “glittering green farmscape” and leaving it at that.
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“Deftly realised magic”: The series does the “return of magic” trope so there’s little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not “realised”—it’s left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don’t know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you’re looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you’re reading the wrong type of fantasy.
Silly errors
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Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei’s name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
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George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
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enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon’s Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there’s no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there’s no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly “enriching” for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.
what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody
It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
“Cerisi” and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?
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CW: creepy dudes
A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:
It made the frontpage.
Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:
Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing
My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.
These are just very weird people.
In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
I wasn’t around but supposedly rationalists were hugely PUA-curious in the early days when entitled nerds commiserating about not getting laid were a major voice in the community, along with a bunch of other more out there incel stuff like bi-maxxing, i.e. trying to get it on with other severely undersexed dudes to scratch the itch.
A lot of it was summarily scrubbed when they started getting money and attention.
The fact that in the community it was widely known who heartiste is (enough for Scott to publish an anti heartiste post) makes it clear they were in pretty deep. Normal places knew about this stuff from the ‘the game’ book (or later somebody like rooshv). Not the neonazi pua.
e: As youtube is spying on me personally, it suggested I watch ‘how one book [the game] ruined sitcoms forever’
Ah yes… the ‘bi hacking’ thing that they got real quiet about…
The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe
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I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club.
Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.
(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)
if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever.
Rationalists used to more openly stew in incel culture, a big part of which is that beyond sex you are also owed undivided love and attention, so there’s probably still a big deal of self-worth attached to that.
Incels who are fine with just paying for it call themselves MGTOW and are kind of a separate subculture that I feel has mostly petered out by now, probably because it’s harder to separate from regular old women-strictly-as-sex-objects type misogyny.
it’s called a sex club.
Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a “hey, how are you” or similar.
Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, I’d probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.
That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.
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Ouch, “picking up a cute young thing at the bar and hot tub at the ski resort” “building a happy working relationship with a sex worker” and “romantic pair-bonding” are three different skills! No wonder he thinks looks and body language are so important if he is trying to take women straight to bed.
RMN is a pro wrestling event, but he probably means Red Means No, Aella’s consensual-nonconsent orgies.
The AI stuff is fun and all, but the awful gender takes is really why I subscribe to sneerclub. I swear some guys don’t realize how cute men can be (when they’re not posting awful gender takes anyway…) and it’s such a weird blind spot.
One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you’re not above average height?
???
imo one should treat others as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to an end
that is to say, ugh! rationalists talk about your relation to other people without making it about consumption challenge
At this point I’m starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. […] “These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,” he added, referring to AI.
They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying “provocative” anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you’re the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.
may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular
It’s jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods
don’t kinkshame
don’t kinkshame
Back in my day California perverts said “don’t scene in public”
good morning
that fuckin company had another funding round
the further one reads, the more depressing it gets
Joining them are strategic infrastructure partners—Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix
cool so it’s going to be even longer before one can buy affordable computers again
I wish all of this a very fuck off and stop already :|
I’m waiting for the “who contributed what under what conditions”. I’m wondering how much of the supposed money follows a rather ovoid trajectory.
FFS the amount of circle
jerkingdealing going on in this industry is absolutely insane.“Hello anthropic. Have some money to spend on our chips”
