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. Also, happy Pride :3)

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    1 hour ago

    This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining

    https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068

    https://archive.is/cKxyV

    David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.

    Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.

    L. O. L.

  • rook@awful.systems
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    6 hours ago

    Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND

    (original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)

    The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like

    Calls Al coding assistants too risky

    Has never tested Al-generated code

    Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets

    Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?

    • scruiser@awful.systems
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      3 hours ago

      I’ve been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never. Donald Trump isn’t going to screw around, and, ironically, DOGE has shown you don’t need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government, so I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink’s government contracts. On the returning end… Elon doesn’t have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don’t think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I’m somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.

      • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
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        12 minutes ago

        Elon’s mother was born in Regina.

        If Canada became the 51st State, that makes Elon the son of an American born citizen and thus eligible for the Presidency.

        If Alberta and Saskatchewan leave Canada (and join the States), this also occurs.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
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        10 hours ago

        I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems
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        18 hours ago

        Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years …

        Elon Musk thinking he’s going to make it to 90 and more is even more delusional than the Mars stuff.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there’s at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.

    https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

    I’m gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek’s screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Possibly OT, but fits in with the “finance ruins everything” motif we’ve got going here:

    My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this

  • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, “will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol”. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don’t want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,

    “Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle the”, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, “MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…”. Desperate emphases mine.

    And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.

    I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was “haha yeah, mathlab is hard”.

    I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife

      B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
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        1 day ago

        I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I’m sure, and then it won’t actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you’re using R or something, if you’re doing genetics on Excel at all you’re probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.

        Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…

    • Enema Cowboy@dotnet.social
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      2 days ago

      @mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984

      “Microsoft Excel…would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.”

    • scruiser@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It’s a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase “don’t be evil”, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.

  • mountainriver@awful.systems
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    I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

    Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don’t usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his “entrepreneurial mindset”, though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways (“Just ask it!”), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 “penicillin-events” in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

    It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn’t touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn’t matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn’t leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

  • rook@awful.systems
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    3 days ago

    For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

    https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

    There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

    As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.

    There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

    It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

    Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.

    AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.