Posts from awful.systems

About us

hence the weird “the AI escaped!!” instead of “we fucked it”

From the Old SneerClub

The Future of Sovereign AI

Copied from the stubsack:

<- from McSweeney’s – and both hilarious and accurate

Edi Zitron has an exclusive report on OpenAI’s 2025 finances:

The incident log for the Red Means No CNC party that’s popular in rat / postrat circles.

Looks like both the feds and state law enforcement / intelligence agencies are tracking the Zizians now.

If Google only takes and never gives, then sites cannot profit. What is the incentive to publish if the only outcome is feeding Google’s AI with no return? What sources will LLMs have to pull from if all the sources are defunct? How far will Google go folding adverts into their AI output?

Pretty much everyone in the word business has noticed that audio and video are kicking writing’s butts in terms of getting an online audience (I am not sure in terms of influencing people in serious jobs). Ivy Astrix mentioned that our dear friends in Berkeley decided that if a camp for wordy bloggers was good, a camp for short-form vloggers would be even better. The camp is about AI doom, but the vlogs don’t have to be. You can live in Berkeley for a month, be paid $2,000, compete for $20,000 in prizes, and hang out with illustrious figures Hereticon alumni like:

tl;dr: Tech youtuber who got way into studying the negative health effects of infrasound produced by data centers (to the point of his research being cited a bunch in relevant court cases) gets a voluminous substack hit piece published on his work by “*an independent writer and researcher funded by a grant from Coefficient Giving to explore topics in AI and other areas*”

archive: https://archive.is/WqQ7a

This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It’s a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that’s God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually “logically necessary”.

As we don’t have a top level post about this already (nor on reddit) I thought why not make one. Archive.is

Transformer is sorta shit, but this is very relevant to our interests. Didn’t know Holden Karnofsky was at Anthropic now.

h/t to Ed Zitron: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mfxqjqoias2q

Richard Ngo (rationalist circle-jerker and former employee of DeepMind and OpenAI) has finally identified the key problem that AI safety people won’t address: it won’t engage honestly with taboos.

Data privacy and AI services have not been the greatest of bedfellows. Studies have shown that employees regularly leak company secrets via assistants, and on-device AI services are a focus of vendors amid concerns about exactly what is being sent to the cloud.

this was already posted on reddit sneerclub, but I decided to crosspost it here so you guys wouldn’t miss out on Yudkowsky calling himself a genre savy character, and him taking what appears to be a shot at the Zizzians

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

I searched for “eugenics” on yud’s xcancel (i will never use twitter, fuck you elongated muskrat) because I was bored, got flashbanged by this gem. yud, genuinely what are you talking about

originally on reddit sneerclub, but reddit didn’t like links to Yarvin’s substack

Claude bros know how to measure performance. They just don’t.