this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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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

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Ask Claude any basic question about biology and it will abort.

it might be that, or it may have been intended to shut off any output of medical-sounding advice. if it's the former, then it's rare rationalist W for wrong reasons

I think they’ve really overrated how much it can help with a bioweapons attack compared to radicalizing and recruiting a few good PhD students and cracking open the textbooks.

look up the story of vil mirzayanov. break out these bayfucker style salaries in eastern europe or india or number of other places and you'll find a long queue of phds willing to cook man made horrors beyond your comprehension. it might even not take six figures (in dollars or euros) after tax

LLMs aren’t actually smart enough to make delicate judgements

maybe they really made machines in their own image

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"hello anthropic? can you pay me 50k a year so that i specifically don't go around making biological weapons? think about all these future simulated beings it'll save"

[–] viq@social.hackerspace.pl 2 points 1 day ago

@fullsquare @cstross at those amounts, no-one is going to take you seriously. You should be asking at least 50M a year.