His group chats with Kevin Roose must be epic.

Just earlier this month, he was brushing off all the problems with GPT-5 and saying that “OpenAI is learning from its greatest success.” He wrapped up a whole story with the following:

At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.

Weaselly little promptfucker.

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the “AI” data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use Three Times as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the Entire City Of New Orleans, every year.

https://bsky.app/profile/wolvendamien.bsky.social/post/3lwyxhchxos2g

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

• Michael Shermer: dry and limp writer, horribly dull public speaker, sex pest
• Sabine Hossenfelder: transphobe, endorser of sex pest Lawrence Krauss, on the subject of physics either incompetent or maliciously deceptive
• Eric Weinstein: Thielboy, he totally invented a Theory of Everything, for realsies, honest, but the dog ate his equations
• Curt Jaimungal: podcast bro who doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia article, but in searching for one we learn that he has platformed a Bell Curve stan
• Scott Aaronson: author of a blog named for a sex fantasy, he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop
• Chris Langan: racist, egomaniacal kook

The phrase “adorned with academic ornamentation” sounds like damning with faint praise, but apparently they just mean it as actual praise, because the rot has reached their brains.

Oh, man, I have opinions about the people in this story. But for now I’ll just comment on this bit:

Note that before this incident, the Malaney-Weinstein work received little attention due to its limited significance and impact. Despite this, Weinstein has suggested that it is worthy of a Nobel prize and claimed (with the support of Brian Keating) that it is “the most deep insight in mathematical economics of the last 25-50 years”. In that same podcast episode, Weinstein also makes the incendiary claim that Juan Maldacena stole such ideas from him and his wife.

The thing is, you can go and look up what Maldacena said about gauge theory and economics. He very obviously saw an article in the widely-read American Journal of Physics, which points back to prior work by K. N. Ilinski and others. And this thread goes back at least to a 1994 paper by Lane Hughston, i.e., years before Pia Malaney’s PhD thesis. I’ve read both; Hughston’s is more detailed and more clear.

By 2029, the AI will even be capable of completing our TPS reports.

“Kevin Roose”? More like Kevin Rube, am I right? Holy shit, I actually am right.

From the r/vibecoding subreddit, which yes is a thing that exists: “What’s the point of vibe coding if I still have to pay a dev to fix it?”

what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actually knows what they’re doing. makes me think vibe coding is just roleplay for guys who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part. am i missing something here or is it really just useless once you step outside the fantasy

(via)

Sneer Club Irreverently Pisstaking Yuddites

Looking at the replies and quotes of a Bluesky post that shared some anti-AI headlines, one definitely gets the sense that a segment of the population will greet the bubble popping with joy not seen since Kissinger died.

And because it’s the LA Times, there’s a chatbot slop section at the bottom to provide false balance.

Quantum computing is still too far out from having even a niche industrial application, let alone something you can sell to middle managers the world over. Anybody who day-traded could get into Bitcoin; millions of people can type questions at a chatbot. Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played “exquisite corpse” parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didn’t pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.

For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud’s coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don’t know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified “lintamande” as Kelsey Piper in 2013.

I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:

The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.

And I got to about here:

Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.

… before the “what the fuck is this fucking shit?” intensified beyond my ability to care.

Erratum: That cursed sentence is from Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn’t).

Dan Olson finds a cursed subreddit:

R/aitubers is all the entitlement of NewTubers but exclusively for people openly churning out slop.

“I’ve automated 2-4 videos daily, zero human intervention, I spend a half hour a week working on this, why am I not getting paid yet?”

The original reddit post:

I’ve been running my YouTube channel for about 3 months. It’s focused on JavaScript and React tutorials, with 2–4 videos uploaded daily. The videos are fully automated (AI-generated with clear explanations, code demos, and screen recordings).

Right now:

• Each video gets only a few views (1–10 views).

• I tried Google Ads ($200 spent) → got ~20 subscribers and ~20 hours of watch time.

• The Google campaigns brought thousands of uncounted views, and the number of Likes was much higher than dislikes.

• Tried Facebook/Reddit groups → but most don’t allow video posting, or posts get very low engagement.

My goal is to reach YPP within 6 months, but the current pace is not enough. I’m investing about $300/month in promotion and I can spend 30 minutes weekly myself.

👉 What would you suggest as the most effective strategy to actually get there?

I finally steeled myself to look at the page history. After dgerard commented about it, someone else tagged the article for additional problems:

• This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. (August 2025)

• This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (August 2025)

Then a third editor added a section … made of LLM bullshit.

I’d probably be exaggerating if I said that every time I looked under the hood of Wikipedia, it reaffirmed how I don’t have the temperament to edit there. But I wouldn’t be exaggerating by much. It’s enough of a hassle to agree upon text in a paper co-authored with a colleague I know personally and like. Dealing with posers whose ego pays them by the word… Ugh.

I bet they learned their intellectual history from a chatbot summary of the Sokal hoax.

Incidentally, Sokal is a TERF now.

for h in Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch