Found a new and lengthy sneer on Bluesky, mocking the promptfondlers' gullibility.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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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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J. Mijin Cha writes:
My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.
Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland's journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.
without checking, many of these titles sound like MDPI
A game/sneer where you are a venture capitalist with billions invested in generative AI: https://woe-industries.itch.io/you-have-billions-invested-in-generative-ai
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Heartbreaking news today.
In a major setback for right-to-repair, iFixit has jumped on the slop bandwagon, introducing an "AI repair helper" to their website that steals "the knowledge base of over 20 years of repair experts" (to quote their dogshit announcement on YouTube) and uses it to hallucinate "repair guides" and "step-by-step instructions" for its users.
A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.
Old Man Stallman comes out swinging against ChatGPT specifically, adding it to the long long list of stuff he doesn't like. For some reason HN is mad at this, as if RMS saying slop is good actually would convince anyone normal to start using it
The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.
The orange-site whippersnappers don't realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, "A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity". In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT's AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn't part of MIT's AI programme.
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Questioning the nature of human intelligence is step 1 in promptfondler whataboutism.
After finding out about her here, I’ve been watching a lot of Angela Collier videos lately. Here’s the most recent one which talks about our life extending friends.
E: just expressing my general appreciation for her vids. Things that I like:
- low frequency of cuts/her speech isn’t broken up into 5 second clips
- lack of kowtowing to algorithmic suggestion
- subtle, dry humour
Which I’m now realising is somewhat counter to current trends in content, which might be contributing to why I like these.
she's great
She also said she basically wants to focus less on the sort of 'callout' content which does well on yt and more focus on actual physics stuff. Which is great, and also good she realized how slippery a slide that sort of content is for your channel.
(I mentioned before how sad it is to see 'angry gamer culture war' channels be stuck in that sort of content, as when they do non rage shit, nobody watches them. (I mean sad for them in an 'if i was them' way btw, dont get me wrong, fuckem for chosing that path (and fuck the system for that they are now financially stuck in that, and that they made this an available path anyway (while making it hard for lgbt people to make a channel about their experiences)), so many people hurt/radicalized for a few clicks and ad money))
the fifth episode of odium symposium, "4chan: the french connection" is now up. roughly the first half of the episode is a dive into sartre's theory of antisemitism. then we apply his theory to the style guide of a nazi news site and the life of its founder, andrew anglin
EDIT: btw if you like the episode please tell people about it! frankly we have no idea how to market or otherwise promote a podcast sooo we're kind of just hoping the listeners do it
favorite one so far! It's like graduate-level 1-900 Hotdog
OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead
I just wanted to point out this tidbit:
Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.
Apparently a fortunate side effect of google supposedly closing the gap is that it's a great opportunity to give up on agents without looking like complete clowns. And also make Pulse even more vapory.
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The Great Leader himself, on how he avoids going insane during the onging End of the World because among other things that's not what an intelligent character would do in a story, but you might not be capable of that.
Saying that at age 46 you are proud of not reenacting tropes from fantasy novels you read when you were 9 is something special. "He's the greatest single mind since L. Ron Hubbard."
His OkCupid profile also showed a weak grasp on the difference between fantasy and reality.
Do we know when he transitioned from Margaret Weiss and Lawrence Watt-Evans to filthy Japanese cartoons?
I forgot to mention it last week, but this is Scott Adams shit. The stuff which made him declare that Trump would win in a landslide in 2016 due to movie rules. Iirc he also claimed he was right on that, despite Trump not winning in a landslide, the sort of goalpost moving bs which he judges others harshly for (despite in the other situations it not applying)
So up next, Yud will claim some pro AI people want him dead and after that Yud will try to convince people he can bring people to orgasm by words alone. I mean those are the 'adamslike' genre tropes now.
The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes.
Nobody is above tropes. Tropes are just patterns you see in narratives. Everything you can describe is a trope. To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.
Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.
Not going mad as the world ends is also a trope, you fuck!
This sense -- which I might call, genre-savviness about the genre of real life -- is historically where I began; it is where I began, somewhere around age nine, to choose not to become the boringly obvious dramatic version of Eliezer Yudkowsky that a cliche author would instantly pattern-complete about a literary character facing my experiences.
We now have a canon mental age for Yud of drumroll nine.
Just decide to be sane
That isn’t how it works, idiot. You can’t “decide to be sane”, that’s like having a private language.
Anyway, just to make the subtext of my other comments into text. Acting like you are a character in a story is a dissociative delusion and counter to reality. It is definitively not sane. Insane, if you will.
Followup:
Look, the world is fucked. All kinds of paradigms we've been taught have been broken left and right. The world has ended many times over in this regard. In place of anything interesting or helpful to address this, Yud's encoded a giant turd into a blog post. How to stay sane? Just stay sane, bro. Easy to say if the only thing threatening your worldview is a made-up robodemon that will never exist.
Here's Yud's actually-quite-easy-to-understand suggestions:
- detach from reality by pretending you are a character in a story as a coping mechanism.
- assume no personal responsibility or agency.
- don't go insane, i.e. make sure you try and fulfil society's expectations of what sanity is.
All of these are terrible. In general, you want to stay grounded in reality, be aware of the agency you have in the world, and don't feel pressured to performatively participate in society, especially if that means doing arbitrary rituals to prove that you are "sane".
Here are my thoughts on "how to stay sane" and "how to cope":
It's entirely reasonable to crash out. I don't want anyone to go insane, but fucking look at all this shit. Datacenters are boiling the oceans. Liberalism is starting its endgame into fascism. All the fucking genocides! Dissociating is acceptable and expected as an emotional response. All of this has been happening in (modern) human history to a degree where crashing out has been reasonable. Yet, many people have been able to "stay sane" in the face of this. If you see someone who appears to be sane, either they're fucked in the head, or they have some perspective or have built up some level of resilience. Whether or not those things can be helpful to someone else is not deterministic. If you are someone who has "stayed sane", please remember to show some empathy and some awareness that it's fine if someone is miserable, because again, everything is fucked.
Putting the above together, I accept basically any reaction to the state of the world. It's reasonable to go either way, and you shouldn't feel bad either way. "Sanity" has different meanings depending on where you look. I think there's a common, unspoken definition that basically boils down to "a sane person is someone who can productively participate in society." This is not a standard you always need to hold yourself to. I think it's helpful to introspect and, uh, "extrospect", here. Like, figure out what you think it means to be sane, what you want it to mean, and what you want. And bounce these ideas off of someone else, because that usually helps.
I think there is another common definition of sanity that might just be "mentally healthy". To that end, things that have helped me, aside from therapy, that aren't particularly insightful or unique:
- Talking to friends
- Finding places to talk about the world going to shit.
- Participating in community, online or irl.
- Basically just finding spaces where stupid shit gets dunked on.
- Leftist meme pages
I mean, is that so fucking hard to say?
To say you are above tropes means you don’t live and exist.
To say you are above tropes is actually a trope
tl;dr i don't actually believe the world is going to end but more importantly i'm Ender Wiggin
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It's very meta for Yud to write a story all about how the story isn't all about himself.
One part in particular pissed me off for being blatantly the opposite of reality
and remembering that it's not about me.
And so similarly I did not make a great show of regret about having spent my teenage years trying to accelerate the development of self-improving AI.
Eliezer literally has multiple sequence about his foolish youth where he nearly destroyed the world trying to jump straight to inventing AI instead of figuring out "AI Friendliness" first!
I did not neglect to conduct a review of what I did wrong and update my policies; you know some of those updates as the Sequences.
Nah, you learned nothing from what you did wrong and your sequence posts were the very sort of self aggrandizing bullshit you're mocking here.
Should I promote it to the center of my narrative in order to make the whole thing be about my dramatic regretful feelings? Nah. I had AGI concerns to work on instead.
Eliezer's "AGI concerns to work on" was making a plan for him, personally, to lead a small team, which would solve meta-ethics and figure out how to implement these meta-ethics in a perfectly reliable way in an AI that didn't exist yet (that a theoretical approach didn't exist for yet, that an inkling of how to make traction on a theoretical approach for didn't exist yet). The very plan Eliezer came up with was self aggrandizing bullshit that made everything about Eliezer.
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