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YourNetworkIsHaunted

@ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

Posts
3
Comments
1587
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I was trying to reply by way of linking a piece by Robert Kingett that had been shared here some time ago that, in excruciating detail and with righteous fury distilled to cold analysis, explained why AI is absolute shit for accessibility aids. His experience is in the realm of physical disability rather than neurodivergance, but that only makes the problems more starkly illustrated rather than unique.

    Unfortunately I couldn't find that piece, but I found this one and needed to explain to the kid why I randomly laughed out loud.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I'm not going to start a punch-up with a dev team or maintainer who believes that AI tools can help good programmers do good work or whatever, but time and again we see that, just like crypto before it, you aren't inviting good programmers to work with you. You're inviting the bros. AI bros and crypto bros are a specific type of Guy. I'm sure there were dotcom bros in the 90s. This is not a new problem, even if the current economic circumstances makes being this type of Guy more viable than ever, apparently.

    It's not just that the tech is bad (though it is bad), it's that it's uniquely privileged by culture and economics to empower the worst assortment of morons and grifters outside of Wall Street (and also inside of Wall Street, because of fucking course it does).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Pete Steinberger shares his OpenAI bill on Twitter. The headline number is $1.3 million in the last 30 days.

    But in his (own) defense, it takes so many tokens to do so many bad ideas at once.

  • Jung in the collectible-card-game store

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  • My God, it's like if Mark Rosewater was also a Nazi.

    Cards on the table, I love M:tG as a game design nerd, and the color pie is a really well-done tool for keeping the game interesting and fun over it's very long history and even longer list of expansions and extensions. From a mechanical perspective, it strikes a beautiful balance between allowing the player to do exactly what they want and preventing the player from just doing everything. Without the color pie, it's easy to see deck building descend into an attempt to assemble the strongest individual cards. It's telling that basically every other CCG has some kind of mechanism to solve the same problem, but I don't think any of them have done it as cleanly or in a way that so smoothly enables players to combine mechanics and elements from different colors.

    From a narrative perspective it's a great story engine that allows for all the disparate settings, characters, even genres that the game has explored over its life to still have a cohesive identity - to rhyme. I would argue that part of why the world's beyond sets have seemed wrong is because the settings weren't designed from the ground up to align with that narrative tool, and no matter how good the actual card designers at WotC are it just isn't going to rhyme properly, like trying to translate poetry to a different language family. But that's beside the point.

    As a psychological model of the world? I mean I guess it's a tool for categorizing and narrowing down the ways that different people interact with each other or the world or whatever. But that's fundamentally not what it's for! Even as bad as the science behind the MBTI or whatever might be, at least they were designed from looking at actual people and intended to categorize them and understand them. This is the equivalent of trying to do therapy based on people's fucking Hogwarts house. Hell, even that was actually intended to fucking categorize people. Like, even without getting into all the ways that he's extending and distorting the actual color pie as used in Magic to match his own fixations, the whole project is so blindingly wrong-headed from the start that it ought to be an old BuzzFeed listicle and not something that people actually use in any clinical setting, even if it is just his wacko girlfriend.

    [To save space, the following several paragraphs of increasingly incoherent ranting and raving are to be filled in by your own imagination. If you do not have an imagination you can consider using an LLM of your choice before going off to fuck yourself]

  • I was SA'd by Rationalists, AMA.

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  • One thing I found really interesting in your recent more reflective writing was part of your experience with hereticon 1:

    I think one of the hardest things you can do, and the greatest gifts you can give someone, is give the situation to them straight when they invite you somewhere. I would realize later that the ‘protection’ I felt in a lot of left-leaning circles was a lot more transitory and a lot less honest than what the supposedly irredeemable far-right conference had done for me.

    One thing that I see in some broadly left-leaning communities when engaging with some of these concerns is to effectively dismiss the women who have been victimized, often with some reference to the face-eating leopard party. (This doesn't seem to happen as much here at awful.systems, which is one of many things I'll say in favor of our community's standards and practices of moderation and whatever else). This is obviously cruel and unfair to those women, but I want to ask about the underlying idea that the way that these social groups or organizations treat women who talk about SA in those communities is consistent with their general political ideologies, since it seems like there's something missing from that idea beyond the simple lack of empathy.

  • I was SA'd by Rationalists, AMA.

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  • I actually didn't refresh to see this until after I had read the pair of "A Normie Girl in Rationalist America" posts (Part 1) (Part 2) and wanted to echo the thanks for sharing your experiences.

  • I was SA'd by Rationalists, AMA.

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  • Seconding this. I'm really grateful that she's willing to talk about this here, and what confirmed stories like this we have show where the Rationalists really cross the line from being cringe and dumb to actively dangerous and malevolent. But also I have to confess that I'm not familiar with what she's written about it previously (or indeed any of her previous writings) and I don't want to ask anything that's been answered already, especially when careless questions risk prodding old pains.

    Ed: I have since done the requisite work of a 10-minute google and longer substack dive but will hold off on specific references or links until we get a confirmation that she's okay with that.

    Ed2: this is what I get for going straight into the edit without refreshing first. Foot, meet mouth. Egg, meet face. Etc.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • But I listened and agreed that you had serious concerns about certain aspects of this technology. I even agreed when you talked about how frustrating it was that specifically other people wanted to do bad things. I listened as you asked whether I had any options to address those concerns! What more do you want from me before you agree to let me do and say whatever I want!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • The whole slice-of-life subgenre is all about this. No real conflict or plot, just scenes of the characters existing in their world. My wife both reads and writes that kind of thing and let me tell you the level of research and worldbuilding that goes into writing a simple meal scene or whatever.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I only know that word from an old (pre-pandemic) book episode of Behind the Bastards, so the immediate association is esoteric antisemitism. I'm not sure how common this is but it seems to support your thesis here.

  • This is getting (Rule)diculous

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  • Some may find her "cringe" but she's doing critical work in stopping the sites you use being DDOSed by AI scrapers.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I mean it's the same thing with sponsored content anywhere, right? The user assumes that the system is providing information in accordance with purposes, but the ads and sponsored results create opportunities for the platform hosting them to profit at the user's expense. AI platforms are absolutely subject to the same economic incentives for corruption as say, search engines, but I don't think they're uniquely so just because the model in question has a more humanlike UI.

  • Rule and the big short

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  • But the effectiveness of the fraud is ironically predicated on people continuing to treat it as gambling.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Adding on that this does feel like another application or consequence of the Great Man Theory of Everything, the idea the only the people with power and money matter because their power and influence are intrinsic to their person rather than being contingent on their social position. The average people empowered to commit insider trading by prediction markets have sufficiently limited individual agency that even collectively they don't actually matter. In fact we want them to try their hand at the grift so that their insights can flow to the enlightened ones who can better use that information. They don't matter enough to do real harm, but by watching the attempt we may be able to learn something.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Following on from yesterday's discussion of Scott's close brush with reality on prediction markets, The Aussie PowerPoint Man is talking about the strategic risks posed by the new insider training opportunities opened up by these tools. A lot of what he's saying applies to normal financial markets, but what's striking is the way that prediction markets create those opportunities for people with much less immediate power and information by allowing them to bet directly on the kinds of immediate decisions they do have information on.

    I also thought the idea of integrating insider training red flags on public prediction markets into your early warning system was an interesting idea. These things aren't actually useful for forecasting or making decisions because of how bad the incentives are, but people acting on those incentives absolutely creates a spike that can be meaningful in the short-term and potentially enable a few extra hours or minutes to prepare.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • I tried digging into it a little bit and it looks like the key word was definitely "less openly racist". According to A blog from someone else who tried to trace jt the term originated with Theo Beale, better known by his nom de merde Vox Day. I know I first became aware of this guy when he started trying to politicize the election process for the Hugo awards in order to make them less woke. It was real dumb.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • You know, I kept expecting both this racist and the racist he was arguing with to start making the very obvious argument for why the racism is not only evil but also dumb. And instead they just kept being racist.

    To summarize and spare anyone else curious, the argument is about immigration. Racist 1 argues that since some people are objectively better than others [citation desperately needed but not wanted] we should have free migration so that our superior quality of life can attract all the best people so that we can be the best place. He (correctly) notes the absurdity of Racist 2 arguing that although some people are objectively better than others we need to protect ourselves from all foreigners even if they are the best people because their foreignness would hurt our "magic dirt." I'm pretty sure I've seen this criticism elsewhere and from a better and less obviously racist writer elsewhere because the phrase "magic dirt" sounds real familiar.

    Also, because I am trying everything back to my particular bugbear today, I have to note that the fundamental and wrong argument that some traits being heritable makes some people objectively better than others is yet another manifestation and justification of what I'm going to start calling the Great Man Theory of Everything. If you start from the position that history, politics, economics, and basically all forms of human activity are fundamentally driven by the actions and decisions of a few people who are for one reason or another destined for power and greatness, you can derive an impressive amount of the libertarian/Rationalist worldview, and if you additionally accept that those people are disproportionately rich white dudes and we shouldn't think too hard about that fact you can get most of the rest of the way there.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

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  • Are prediction markets not actually useful? No, it is the reality who is wrong.

    Also I want to rant once again about the stupid way these people evade the insider trading problem, because there's a particular failure at play that I keep finding expressed in new and interesting ways.

    So the argument goes that while insider trading may be bad for a financial market it actually just allows insiders to add their information to increase the predictive power of the market. Which would be true enough if we assume nothing else changes, but the same would also be true for price discovery in a normal asset market. Clearly we're missing something.

    So why is it insider trading bad? Because it turns people without insider info into the dumb money you can take advantage of. And people, very reasonably, aren't going to participate in a system where their main role is being taken advantage of. Their departure means that the insiders don't have access to a pool of dumb money to take so they stop interacting with the system, and the market itself breaks down.

    Now if you assume that the majority of people are "NPCs" or aren't very "agentic" or whatever then they're not going to act in systemically meaningful ways no matter how obvious the incentives to do so. You could also cast it as a version of the libertarian-as-housecat notion that markets simply exist as a natural system, rather than being pieces of economic infrastructure that require a lot of management and work to keep functioning at all, even before we get to the question of whether they operate to the public's benefit. So many of the problems with these ideologies spring from this belief that only some people actually matter in a systemic sense by dictating rules and Building Things and being big men, rather than systems being constantly created and shaped by all the people who interact with them through those interactions.