this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Just two weeks til' Halloween now.

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] lurker@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Might as well start this off

so we all remember this graph from AI 2027 right? the graph that the whole paper relies on?

well its wrong. not just normal wrong, it’s ‘the authors literally disowned it’ wrong

(ignore the claude mythos purple x i took this from a reddit screenshot) but they completely changed their predictions in december 2025, several months after the original paper was published

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Is this the thing where the baked an asymptote to infinity into their "model"? It was both bad modeling and also made all of their other input "data" completely irrelevant. I remember someone pointing this out at the time AI 2027 dropped, but there was so many other problems with it in the sneer spaces we didn't talk about it too much among all the other problems. And someone on lesswrong actually pointed it out, but somehow, "we accidentally baked an asymptote into our model that is supposed to be detailed and carefully thought out" wasn't a breaking point for lesswrongers.

[–] rhamph@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Actually it was literally an asymptote in the first version of their models they posted to github. They had a term that they were dividing by that ends up going to zero, so the entire equation breaks! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models

So, now we can answer the question from before: what time horizon does the red curve above predict for 2030?

Well, if you plug it into wolfram alpha, you get a time horizon of “-2542 - 11372i”

Yes, that is negative, and that is an imaginary number in there.

What’s actually happening is that when the term in the brackets above hit zero, we end up dividing by zero, and hit infinity. Beyond that, we get a negative number to the power of a non-integer, which gives nonsensical complex numbered answers.

The infinity point for this equation happens at a time of t = To/alpha, and will always occur at some point, no matter what initial parameters you use.

In fact, this infinity point is completely independent of both the time horizon and the SC threshold. If you keep the same alpha and doubling time, you could start with a time horizon of a nanosecond, and have a superhuman coding threshold of 1 trillion years, and the curve will still claim that superhuman coding will arrive before the end of 2029.

And indeed, reddit user mambo-12345 tried modifying the simulation parameters to drop the initial time horizon to 15 nanoseconds instead of 15 minutes, and the resulting curve still had a peak for the estimated superhuman coder arrival at 2026.5 years and a median at 2035. Credit to them for inspiring me to take a closer look here:

[–] rhamph@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Have I misunderstood what they meant by ‘superexponential’? I thought they were doing exp(exp(t)) but I am inferring that it’s somehow even sillier than that?

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

It was something stupider and sillier yeah. The link explains, but to tldr; exp(some complicated term) where the "some complicated term" has a division by a number that eventually goes to 0. I think it was... them trying to represent "horizon time" (as in that one stupid METR graph that gets repeated everywhere) increases happening faster and faster?

[–] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago

I believe so

[–] rhamph@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

That ‘superexponential’ thing annoys me so much. Just the most blatant ‘the line goes up because I really really want it to’, while all their rationalisations for it are just describing exponential behaviour.

We talk about the importance of humanities but it’d be nice if they learnt a bit of maths too.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Not sure if the book also did super exp lines, but the graphs in the singularity is near also have various issues that never got to much deep thought.

Always found it funny that the book admits basically (no direct quote): "sure tech follows an S-curve normally, and that looks exponential at first, but if you take the rate of all historic new techs together on a timeline that clearly is exponential".

And I just thought, you cant know if it is, thats the point with the S-curve as well, and it messes people up. (Like Disco Stew from the Simpsons), and your N=1, it might not even be a S-curve, it could just have a sudden ceiling.

Despite wanting to believe, I was less convinced. (also, not sure if it was just my copy but Yudkowsky's name was spelled wrong, still looking for somebody who has a physical copy who is willing to check for me if that was also in print or just a pdf error)

Back to the subject, a course in business management would have also helped here.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago (2 children)

"Sigmoids always add to an exponential curve!" is another standard futurist trope from the 1960s and 1970s. Sci fi authors used to share this diagram with a curve fitted to pony express to trains to automobiles to aircraft to chemical rockets. "Nuclear rocket" and "interstellar spacecraft" were helpfully sketched in as the obvious next steps. Needless to say, we did not develop drives which can reach 10^-3 C around the year 2000 and will not reach 10^-2 C (just 430 years to Alpha Centauri) by 2050.

[–] theodoraward@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

this is fucking time cube lol

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

woah damn why does this look exactly like some Kurzweil bullshit

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have not read any Kurzweil for 20 years but I think if you read him most of it will be recycled '50s-'70s tropes. Even nanotech appeared in a Feynmann talk, and Moore's Law is from 1965. Remember, cranks keep presenting ideas which were refuted long ago as new.

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You ever read "The Prospect of Immortality" by the guy who founded the idea of cryonics? Or the "anabolocyte" paper? They're such trips!

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

No, reading Larry Niven stories with corpsicles and autodocs was enough for me.

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

On multiple occasions I have had to tell incredulous people that Niven got the idea of cryonics from real world people not the other way around...