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)
image transcription
Zach Weinersmith skeeted: Movie idea:
Effective Altruism Star Wars, in which it’s OK to be a Sith as long as the majority of your earnings go through vetted charities.
Plod skeeted: And when the Death Star explodes it’s due to fraudulant accounting
tiedoton skeeted: Building endless swaths of droids that do nothing but continuously experience bliss to offset any suffering caused by the Empire.
Not sure if that would be done by the Empire or the Rebellion
This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn’t gotten the message, saying that the project has been “paused”. It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.
Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.
Today’s “Christ, what an asshole” award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th’OSU.
A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.
https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t
https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
Congrats! :D
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Congrats!
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.
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.
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…
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *they’d* use ChatGPT nowadays then you’d be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
mathrix laboratory
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
“Microsoft Excel…would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.”
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?
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the people who think it’s impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.
Perfection
Engineering/Adoptive: Adds eval tests to flag hallucinations
Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.
Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI
Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed
Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like
I wonder where Edsger Dijkstra would fall in this table.
0,0 position, to the left of the makeupless guy above the engineering bit.
Also, happy Pride :3
Yes, happy pride month everyone!
I’ve decided that this year I’m going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows… wonder if anyone will notice.
Hell yeah!
Seems there’s a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I’ve been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.
I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.
Thank you.
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I’m not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
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.
I’ve just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
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
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.
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.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with “sorry, we really aren’t equipped to help you”
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
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.
Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:
https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz
(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)
OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.
OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.
Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.
First we mine, then we craft hey does anyoune else smell burnt toast?
Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.
lol jfc
Ya’ll seein this shit?
there’s no anime avatar, how do we know it’s really Elon?
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.
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
as I said elsewhere (and have from early around the doge announcement): he was never going to last because orange was never going to felon lead, and felon was never going to settle. and everyone who brought him in did so knowing that, but that was fine for them because they were using him as a useful idiot, as a politically useful wrecking ball who they could dump all blame on later and wash their hands of
DOGE has shown you don’t need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government
this tracks with historical fascist power seizures, although ofc updated in the detail of “let felon run wild, then just accept the outcome and use it as a new precedent”. he provided them with a test run of finding just how egregious they could go without pushback (and thus where they need to machinate more)
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.
overall, same yeah. felon’s long appeared to be comfortable socking for outside influences, so maybe he might go knocking for some more russian/chinese/indian/emirati/whatever war funding, but maaaybe not find some soon enough to prop up his whole house of cards?
(besides, the entire ai craze is begging in the same corners, which maybe is a good thing in this light)
Would be best if he treated Musk like how they treated the four icc judges. Sanction Musk. (I heard this has basically destroyed the ICCs ability to do things btw)
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.
he’s going on an all-psyker diet
I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy
I don’t think it’sa stretch to see the independence of spacex classified as a national security risk and have it nationalised (though not called that, because that sounds too socialist) and have associated people such as elon declared traitors. Shouldn’t even be that difficult these days, seeing how he’s trashed his own reputation, and it’ll be good to encourage the other plutocrats to stay in line.
Night of the long knives is in the playbook, after all
@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she’s the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she’s a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)
It isn’t clear that anyone in trump’s government has ever paused to consider than any of their plans might have downsides.
there are ways to make it work https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/russia-central-banker-wanted-out-over-ukraine-but-putin-said-no
If only!
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.
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