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)
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.
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
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
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.
Time for my infrequent missive about the intersection of sneerspace and comedy podcasts. The current episode of one of my favourite comedy podcasts, Doughboys, jumpscared me today when one of the hosts, Mitch, came back from a toilet break and independently came up with the fundamentals of Roko’s Basilisk (the torture in cyberspace part). Anyway here it is, or if you want, you can start with the context of the toilet break. What’s important to note is that these guys do not try to present themselves as intelligent, and usually present themselves as stupid.
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.
I also appreciate how many of the “transformative” actions are just “did a really good thing… with AI!”
HR reduced time-to-hire by 30%! How? They told Jerry to stop hand-copying each candidate’s resume (I sleep). Also we tried out an LLM for… something (Real shit).
Like, these are not examples of how AI adoption can benefit your organization and why being on board is important. They’re split between “things you can do to mitigate the flaws in AI” and “things that would be good if your organization could do” and an implication that the two are related.
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.
Ya’ll seein this shit?
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)
there’s no anime avatar, how do we know it’s really Elon?
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!
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
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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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.
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
Tired: brain rot
Wired: brain soap
AI audio transcription is great.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987
Sean Murray @NoMansSky
Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.
Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.
Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.
LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
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 :/
mathrix laboratory
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
“Microsoft Excel…would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.”
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
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
