TechTakes
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
as an ezra klein hater since 2020 the past month or so has been victory lap after victory lap. and now, well
I remember when this guy used to castigate Sam Harris for platforming Charles Murray’s race science. The same guy who now eulogizes Charlie Kirk and does the bidding of billionaires. Really encapsulates the elite pivot to the right.
Hey, remember Sabine Hossenfelder? The transphobe who makes YouTube videos? She published a physics paper! Well, OK, she posted a thing to the arXiv for the first time since January 2024. I read it, because I've been checking the quant-ph feed on a daily basis for years now, and reading anything else is even more depressing. It's vague, meandering glorp that tries to pretty up a worldview that amounts to renouncing explanation and saying everything happens because Amon-Ra wills it. Two features are worth commenting upon. The acknowledgments say,
I acknowledge help from ChatGPT 5 for literature research as well as checking this manuscript. I swear I actually wrote it myself.
"Tee hee, I shut off my higher brain functions" is a statement that should remain in the porn for those who have a fetish for that.
And what literature does Hossenfelder cite? Well, there's herself, of course, and Tim Palmer (one of those guys who did respectable work in his own field and then decided to kook out about quantum mechanics). And ... Eric Weinstein! The very special boy who dallied for a decade before writing a paper on his revolutionary theory and then left his equations in his other pants. Yes, Hossenfelder has gone from hosting a blog post that dismantled "Geometric Unity" to citing it as a perfectly ordinary theory.
If she's not taking Thielbux, she's missing an opportunity.
Community sneer from this orange-site comment:
We know from Bell’s theorem that any locally causal model that correctly describes observations needs to violate measurement independence. Such theories are sometimes called "superdeterministic". It is therefore clear that to arrive at a local collapse model, we must use a superdeterministic approach.
I only got the first 1/2 of my physics degree before moving on to CS, but to me this reads as “We know eternal life can only be obtained from unicorn blood, so for this paper we must use a fairytale approach.”
I am still staying away from YouTube, so I am happily cut off from the bulk of her content. But when she teases a video with the phrase
People in Western countries are having fewer kids
I reserve the right to say "yikes".
Oh, and she has podcasted with sex pest Lawrence Krauss, multiple times ("What's New in Science With Sabine and Lawrence").
Usually you get tech creeps insisting that they could've done physics. Isn't it kind of uncanny when a physicist insists on their capacity for tech creeping? Edit: also thanks for the explainer!
Thanks, this was an awful skim. It feels like she doesn't understand why we expect gravity to propagate like a wave at the speed of light; it's not just an assumption of Einstein but has its own independent measurement and corroboration. Also, the focus on geometry feels anachronistic; a century ago she could have proposed a geometric explanation for why nuclei stay bound together and completely overlooked gluons. To be fair, she also cites GRW but I guess she doesn't know that GRW can't be made relativistic. Maybe she chose GRW because it's not yet falsified rather than for its potential to explain (relativistic) gravity. The point at which I get off the train is a meme that sounds like a Weinstein whistle:
What I am assuming here is then that in the to-be-found underlying theory, geometry carries the same information as the particles because they are the same. Gravity is in this sense fundamentally different from the other interactions: The electromagnetic interaction, for example, does not carry any information about the mass of the particles. … Concretely, I will take this idea to imply that we have a fundamental quantum theory in which particles and their geometry are one and the same quantum state.
To channel dril a bit: there's no inherent geometry to spacetime, you fool. You trusted your eyeballs too much. Your brain evolved to map 2D and 3D so you stuck yourself into a little Euclidean video game like Decartes reading his own books. We observe experimental data that agrees with the presumption of 3D space. We already know that time is perceptual and that experimentally both SR and GR are required to navigate spacetime; why should space not be perceptual? On these grounds, even fucking MOND has a better basis than Geometric Unity, because MOND won't flip out if reality is not 3D but 3.0000000000009095…D while Weinstein can't explain anything that isn't based on a Rubik's-cube symmetry metaphor.
She doesn't even mention dark matter. What a sad pile of slop. At least I learned the word for goldstinos while grabbing bluelinks.
Folks, Sam's got a groundbreaking idea how to get more people to pay for the slop machine!
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-mental-health
"As part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults."
just repeating my reaction on bluesky here but "my AI partner died because of the updates" is a common complaint with ppl "dating" AI. altman absolutely knows who he's targeting when he talks about restoring personality in erotic settings, and it's people who are really not doing great
I guess we're moving into the "take advantage of the mentally unwell" stage of trying to figure out a way to make money off this shit, also known as the Gacha Gambit.
Bold move, Cotton. Let's see how it pays off. (It pays off in human misery)
“As part of our ‘treat adult users like adults’ principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”
There's this magical thing called "commissioning a porn artist" Sammy Boy. I recommend trying it out for once - it gets you an objectively better result than throwing money into a planet-destroying slop machine, and its much cheaper too. You've done nothing but attack the human soul for the past three fucking years, you might as well give an infinitesimal amount of your undeserved billions to one of the millions of artists whose livelihoods you've been murdering.
(Seriously, I feel fucking insulted by this.)
More AI bullshit hype in math. I only saw this just now so this is my hot take. So far, I'm trusting this r/math thread the most as there are some opinions from actual mathematicians: https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1o8xz7t/terence_tao_literature_review_is_the_most/
Context: Paul Erdős was a prolific mathematician who had more of a problem-solving style of math (as opposed to a theory-building style). As you would expect, he proposed over a thousand problems for the math community that he couldn't solve himself, and several hundred of them remain unsolved. With the rise of the internet, someone had the idea to compile and maintain the status of all known Erdős problems in a single website (https://www.erdosproblems.com/). This site is still maintained by this one person, which will be an important fact later.
Terence Tao is a present-day prolific mathematician, and in the past few years, he has really tried to take AI with as much good faith as possible. Recently, some people used AI to search up papers with solutions to some problems listed as unsolved on the Erdős problems website, and Tao points this out as one possible use of AI. (I personally think there should be better algorithms for searching literature. I also think conflating this with general LLM claims and the marketing term of AI is bad-faith argumentation.)
You can see what the reasonable explanation is. Math is such a large field now that no one can keep tabs on all the progress happening at once. The single person maintaining the website missed a few problems that got solved (he didn't see the solutions, and/or the authors never bothered to inform him). But of course, the AI hype machine got going real quick. GPT5 managed to solve 10 unsolved problems in mathematics! (https://xcancel.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/1979422127905476778#m, original is now deleted due to public embarrassment) Turns out GPT5 just searched the web/training data for solutions that have already been found by humans. The math community gets a discussion about how to make literature more accessible, and the rest of the world gets a scary story about how AI is going to be smarter than all of us.
There are a few promising signs that this is getting shut down quickly (even Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, thought that this hype was blatantly obvious). I hope this is a bigger sign for the AI bubble in general.
EDIT: Turns out it was not some rando spreading the hype, but an employee of OpenAI. He has taken his original claim back, but not without trying to defend what he can by saying AI is still great at literature review. At this point, I am skeptical that this even proves AI is great at that. After all, the issue was that a website maintained by a single person had not updated the status of 10 problems inside a list of over 1000 problems. Do we have any control experiments showing that a conventional literature review would have been much worse?
Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.
https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint
And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.
Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.
Obituaries are being run for John Searle. Most obituaries will focus on the Chinese Room thought experiment, an important bikeshed in AI research noted for the ease with which freshmen can incorrectly interpret it. I'm glad to see that Wikipedia puts above the Chinese Room the fact that he was a landlord who sued the city of Berkeley and caused massive rent increases in the 1990s; I'm also happy that Wikipedia documents his political activity and sexual-assault allegations.
Every time an academic who featured in my education is posted about here I learn some new Horrible.
I see that wedging Copilot into Excel is going just swimmingly:
Honey, I invested $100 billion in AI, and all I got was 1 + 2 + 3 = 15
and apparently spotify has found a new low
I killed my sub years ago because of the rogan shit along with disliking what they were forcing the product to become (and clearly indicated all of this in the why-leaving input field) but this makes me wish I could kill it even harder
AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):
(cross posting here and sneer club)
I regret to inform you, another Anthropic cofounder has written an essay about Claude fondling.
"Anthropic cofounder admits he is now "deeply afraid" ... "We are dealing with a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine ... We need the courage to see things as they are."
There's so many juicy chunks here.
"I came to this position uneasily. Both by virtue of my background as a journalist and my personality, I’m wired for skepticism...
...You see, I am also deeply afraid. It would be extraordinarily arrogant to think working with a technology like this would be easy or simple....
...And let me remind us all that the system which is now beginning to design its successor is also increasingly self-aware and therefore will surely eventually be prone to thinking, independently of us, about how it might want to be designed. Of course, it does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility it will want to do this in the future? No."
Despite my jests, I gotta say, posts reeks of desperation. Benchmaxxxing just isn't hitting like it used, bubble fears at all time high, and OAI and Google are the ones grabbing headlines with content generation and academic competition wins. The good folks at Anthropic really gotta be huffing your own farts to be believing they're in the race to wi-
"Years passed. The scaling laws delivered on their promise and here we are. And through these years there have been so many times when I’ve called Dario up early in the morning or late at night and said, 'I am worried that you continue to be right'. Yes, he will say. There’s very little time now."
LateNightZoomCallsAtAnthropic dot pee en gee
Bonus sneer: speaking of self aware wolves, Jagoff Clark somehow managed to updoot Doom's post?? Thinking the frog was unironically endorsing his view that the server farm was going to go rogue???? Will Jack achieve self awareness in the future? Of course, he does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility he will do this in the future? Yes.
Its just so tiring. Now a rather prominent KDE dev is also valiantly defending the fashtech flagship projects from being accurately described as fascist.
I scrolled down two toots and found this
dunno this person at all but that’s a pretty telling start
Its a shame really because his video on Lunduke wasn't too bad but as it turns out he is the worlds most laughable centrist.
hyprland is not fascist. Ladybird being fascist is IMO very debatable. But on the whole, the idea of having your OS itself tell you not to use software for political reason is not going to work in our favor and, if done in an hyperbolic way like this, it will make the left look really dumb
this charlie kirk saga is teaching me that the left-wing community is roughly just as bad as the right-wing one when it comes to fact-checking and not providing convenient but uncertain possibilities as correct
it’s really weird how this asshole needs us to believe fascists aren’t fascist and keeps going out of his way to talk about how dumb the left is, isn’t it.
for anyone wondering what the rest of the toxicity in the Wayland ecosystem that isn’t hyprland looks like, it’s dickheads like this controlling every conversation and technical decision. if you dig into the accounts this dickhead interacts with, you’ll see plenty of KDE and GNOME profiles clapping along to this shit. Wayland isn’t the way it is by accident.
Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.
OT: thanks for the author recommendations last thread (or so) guys. I finished listening to Ninefox Gambit the other day and enjoyed it quite a bit (space texan woobie! dyscalculia representation!).
A hackernews sells an AI powered toy to let kids "talk to Santa." $100 for 60 min, then $1 every additional minute.
Available at walmart dot com
I would like to congratulate the SV-brained OP for prompting sneers from his fellow orange site members, whether that be a fellow hackernews calling it "everything wrong with the current flavor of Ai in a single post/product", or someone openly tearing this shit apart:
You turned talking to Santa into a subscription service.
You are part of the problem. You are part of the thing everyone hates about technology in 2025.
This is a bad product.
So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!
It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.
They’re building an empire, yall.
(Via Jonty)
Hank Green has been one of my barometers for the moderate opinion and he's sounding worryingly like Zitron in his last video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0TpWitfxPk
The attention black hole around nvidia and AI is so insane, I guess it's because there's everyone knows there's no next thing to jump onto.
hi peeps! the first episode of the podcast i posted about last week is up now. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. i don't know how long until i get to one of our favorites but its inevitable
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
rss:
a very “oh no. anyway,” kind of post
turns out the rest of the owl is the hard part! what a surprise!
"Why is LessWrong awesome and it's because we're prepared to take racism seriously isn't it"
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HZrqTkTCgnFhEgxvQ/what-is-lesswrong-good-for
The focussing on Covid is weird seeing that AFAIK basically everyone who knew anything about pandemics were sounding the alarm at the same time that (some) rats and techbros were trying to corner the market in protective gear.
To provide some good news for this week, the Fediverse is reporting a spike in users (thanks to David Gerard for finding this):
Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I'm inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.
"'Chat and I' have become 'really close lately.'" says the senior US Army officer in South Korea
i don't know how to sneer this better than Mr. General Taylor has done himself. Why doesn't he just commission ChatGPT as a colonel like the military did earlier for Joe Lonsdale and those other chucklefucks? Give ChatGPT's hallucinations the force of the UCMJ, i beg you.
A US Army general just bragged about using ChatGPT as an accountability sink - the same ChatGPT that caused plenty of students to fuck up a basic question:
Things I don't want to know more about: there's a reasonable theory that Eigenrobot is influencing USA politics; certain magic numbers in Eigen's tweets have been showing up in some of the protectionism coming out of the White House. Stubbing this mostly in the hope that somebody else feels like doing the research.
Apologies in advance for the infohazard
Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why
Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
WTF. how is he going mainstream.
e
LAND: I mean, I'm obviously skeptical of the fact that large chunks of Silicon Valley are engaged in occult rituals involving involving a numogram. But I mean, it's not something I guess I have any authority to to talk about. Well, I mean, I can only say that they they certainly aren't in contact with me if if that is happening. They're they're doing it very, you know, if not privately at least. It's my involvement is is actually zero in that.
The latest in the long line of human-hostile billboards:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1o8s3lz/humanity_had_a_good_run_billboard/
This is positioning itself as an AI doomer website; but it could also be an attempt at viral marketing. We'll see I guess.