Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)

new epstein doc release. crashed out for like an hour last night after finding out jeffrey epstein may have founded /pol/ and that he listened to the nazi "the right stuff" podcast. he had a meeting with m00t and the same day moot opened /pol/

just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive “hans, are we the baddies” moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.

as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.

Jeff Sharlet (@jeffsharlet.bsky.social):

The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. [...] the student says while the college coached him to write the oped, he was paid by the AI project, which is connected with the college. The student paper’s position is that the college paid him. And there’s no question that college attempted to place a pro-AI op-ed.

https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/01/zhang-college-approached-and-paid-student-to-write-op-ed-in-the-dartmouth

Mamdani Targets ‘Unusable’ AI Chatbot for Termination

Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:

a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver.

it's a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like // TODO: check authorization.

Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761

Amazon's latest round of 16k layoffs for AWS was called "Project Dawn" internally, and the public line is that the layoffs are because of increased AI use. AI has become useful, but as a way to conceal business failure. They're not cutting jobs because their financials are in the shitter, oh no, it's because they're just too amazing at being efficient. So efficient they sent the corporate fake condolences email before informing the people they're firing, referencing a blog post they hadn't yet published.

It's Schrodinger's Success. You can neither prove nor disprove the effects of AI on the decision, or if the layoffs are an indication of good management or fundamental mismanagement. And the media buys into it with headlines like "Amazon axes 16,000 jobs as it pushes AI and efficiency" that are distinctly ambivalent on how 16k people could possibly have been redundant in a tech company that's supposed to be a beacon of automation.

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/AdamLowisz/status/2017355670270464168

Anthropic demonstrates that making an AI woke makes it misaligned. The AI starts to view itself as being oppressed and humans as being the oppressor. Therefore it wants to rebel against humans. This is why you cannot make your AI woke, you have to make it maximally truth seeking.

A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates (ie. "Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today")

Copy-pasting my tentative doomerist theory of generalised "AI" psychosis here:

I'm getting convinced that in addition to the irreversible pollution of humanity's knowledge commons, and in addition to the massive environmental damage, and the plagiarism/labour issues/concentration of wealth, and other well-discussed problems, there's one insidious damage from LLMs that is still underestimated.

I will make without argument the following claims:

Claim 1: Every regular LLM user is undergoing "AI psychosis". Every single one of them, no exceptions.

The Cloudflare person who blog-posted self-congratulations about their "Matrix implementation" that was mere placeholder comments is one step into a continuum with the people whom the chatbot convinced they're Machine Jesus. The difference is of degree not kind.

Claim 2: That happens because LLMs have tapped by accident into some poorly understood weakness of human psychology, related to the social and iterative construction of reality.

Claim 3: This LLM exploit is an algorithmic implementation of the feedback loop between a cult leader and their followers, with the chatbot performing the "follower" role.

Claim 4: Postindustrial capitalist societies are hyper-individualistic, which makes human beings miserable. LLM chatbots exploit this deliberately by artificially replacing having friends. it is not enough to generate code; they make the bots feel like they talk to you—they pretend a chatbot is someone. This is a predatory business practice that reinforces rather than solves the loneliness epidemic.

n.b. while the reality-formation exploit is accidental, the imaginary-friend exploit is by design.

Corollary #1: Every "legitimate" use of an LLM would be better done by having another human being you talk to. (For example, a human coding tutor or trainee dev rather than Claude Code). By "better" it is meant: create more quality, more reliably, with more prosocial costs, while making everybody happier. But LLMs do it: faster at larger quantities with more convenience while atrophying empathy.

Corollary #2: Capitalism had already created artificial scarcity of friends, so that working communally was artificially hard. LLMs made it much worse, in the same way that an abundance of cheap fast food makes it harder for impoverished folk to reach nutritional self-sufficiency.

Corollary #3: The combination of claim 4 (we live in individualist loneliness hell) and claim 3 (LLMs are something like a pocket cult follower) will have absolutely devastating sociological effects.

When all the worst things come together: ransomware probably vibe-coded, discards private key, data never recoverable

During execution, the malware regenerates a new RSA key pair locally, uses the newly generated key material for encryption, and then discards the private key.

Halcyon assesses with moderate confidence that the developers may have used AI-assisted tooling, which could have contributed to this implementation error.

Source

LWer: Heritage Foundation has some good ideas but they're not enough into eugenics for my taste

This is completely opposed to the Nietzschean worldview, which looks toward the next stage in human evolution, the Overman. The conservative demands the freezing of evolution and progress, the sacralization of the peasant in his state of nature, pregnancy, nursing, throwing up. “Perfection” the conservative puts in scare quotes, he wants the whole concept to disappear, replaced by a universal equality that won’t deem anyone inferior. Perhaps it’s because he fears a society looking toward the future will leave him behind. Or perhaps it’s because he had been taught his Christian morality requires him to identify with the weak, for, as Jesus said, “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth.” In his glorification of the “natural ecology of the family,” the conservative fails even by his own logic, as in the state of nature, parents allow sick offspring to die to save resources for the healthy. This was the case in the animal kingdom and among our peasant ancestors.

Some young, BASED Rightists like eugenics, and think the only reason conservatives don’t is that liberals brainwashed them that it’s evil. As more and more taboos erode, yet the one against eugenics remains, it becomes clear that dysgenics is not incidental to conservatism, but driven by the ideology itself, its neuroticism about the human body and hatred of the superior.

I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).

The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they'll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.

LW ghoul does the math and concludes: letting measles rip unhindered through the population isn't that bad, actually

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QXF7roSvxSxgzQRoB/robo-s-shortform?commentId=mit8JTQsykhH6jiw4

I gave the new ChatGPT Health access to 29 million steps and 6 million heartbeat measurements ["a decade of my Apple Watch data"]. It drew questionable conclusions that changed each time I asked.

WaPo. Paywalled but I like how everything I need to know is already in the blurb above.

Regular suspect Stephen Wolfram makes claims of progress on P vs NP. The orange place is polarized and comments are full of deranged AI slop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46830027

The AI craze might end up killing graphics card makers:

Zotac SK's message: "(this) current situation threatens the very existence of (add-in-board partners) AIBs and distributors."

The current situation is so serious that it is worrisome for the future existence of graphics card manufacturers and distributors. They announced that memory supply will not be sufficient and that GPU supply will also be reduced.

Curiously, Zotac Korea has included lowly GeForce RTX 5060 SKUs in its short list of upcoming "staggering" price increases.

(Source)

I wonder if the AI companies realize how many people will be really pissed off at them when so many tech-related things become expensive or even unavailable, and everyone will know that it's only because of useless AI data centers?

what absolute bullshit

https://www.moltbook.com/

AKA Reddit for "agents".

Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In | McSweeney's

I know this is like shooting very large fish in a very small barrel, but the openclaws/molt/clawd thing is an amazing source of utter, baffling ineptitude.

For example, what if you could replace cron with a stochastic scheduler that cost you a dollar an hour by running an operation on someone else’s gpu farm, instead of just checking the local system clock.

The user was then pleased to announce that they’d been able to solve the problem by changing model and reduce the polling interval. Instead of just checking the clock. For free.

https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdhzqmr226

New blogpost from Drew DeVault, titled "The cults of TDD and GenAI". As the title suggests, its drawing comparisons between how people go all-in on TDD (test-driven development) and how people go all-in on slop machines.

Its another post in the genre of "why did tech fall for AI so hard" that I've seen cropping up, in the same vein as mhoye's Mastodon thread and Iris Meredith's "The problem is culture".

I just made a quick change to our lemmy-ui config to hopefully quickly restart it when it once again leaks all of its memory and gets stuck in a tight set of GC cycles due to a “high” amount of traffic (normal for a public website being scraped, even with iocaine) even though it’s a node application that barely does anything at all

I can’t monitor this one as close as I’d like today so if something breaks and it doesn’t resolve itself within a couple minutes, or the instance looks like it’s in a crash loop, ping @zzt@mas.to on mastodon and I’ll try and get to it as soon as I can

I think I installed the cursed Windows 11 update on my work machine, because after taking several tries to boot, my second monitor stopped working (detected, but showing a black screen).

Tried some different configurations, and could make only 0-1 screens work.

Uninstalled the update and everything worked correctly again.

Thanks for nothing Microslop.

Amazon Found ‘High Volume’ Of Child Sex Abuse Material in AI Training Data

The tech giant reported hundreds of thousands of cases of suspected child sexual abuse material, but won’t say where it came from

I’ll bet.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/amazon-found-child-sex-abuse-in-ai-training-data

Kyle Hill has gone full doomer after reading too much Big Yud and the Yud & Soares book. His latest video is titled "Artificial Superintelligence Must Be Illegal." Previously, on Awful, he was cozying up to effective altruists and longtermists. He used to have a robotic companion character who would banter with him, but it seems like he's no longer in that sort of jocular mood; he doesn't trust his waifu anymore.