Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
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.
Zitron catching strays in the comments for having too much of a bullying tone, I guess against billionaires and tech writers, and being too insistent on his opinion that the whole thing makes no financial sense. It’s also lamented that the entire field of ML avoids bsky because it has a huge AI hostility problem.
Concern trolling notwithstanding, the eigenrobot stuff is worrisome though, if not specifically for him about how extremely online the ideological core of the administration seems to be, as close to the lunatics running the asylum as you’ll get in a modern political setting.
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.
Rain, rain, go away, barkle down another day
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!).
Hell yeah
Not gonna lie, it was really cool seeing the representation (tho I have NVLD and not dyscalculia). I think it was the first time I’d run across it in fiction!
“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.
Also they have memory holed that Scott claimed stopping smoking would help with covid. Not because there was proof of it, but just because he dislikes smokers. Maximum truth seeking my ass.
What do you reckon the overlap is between the grown men who are mad about the new pokemon game and our regular subjects?
The LW types not that much, at least not more than your average online rightwinger I think.
new pokemon game
i’m severely lacking context 😕
Yeah comeon OP spill the tea, I want my daily dose of drama, which pokémons are those and why are men angry about them 🍵
A new pokemon game for switch/switch2 came out (Pokemon Legends Z-A)
Lots of gamergate smell wafting around gamer reddit, particularly regarding conspiracy theories about reviews. Dudes being completely unhinged that it isn’t whatever version they played when they were 10 years old but with AAA graphics. Real normal stuff to reply about 100x in a day.
It could just be me being defensive about a thing my kids like lol.
It’s just that my intuition nudges me when I come across that variety of authoritarian confidently incorrect guy who can’t imagine people liking things that they dont like (or vice versa), and who will move worlds to enforce their one true take. It feels like they’re everywhere, fueling most dumb internet social movements. It’s like it could be a small piece of a General Theory of Weird Online Assholes.
The phenomenon rhymes with Musk Reply Guys, Music Experts Who Hate Taylor Swift Professionally, Claude Code Evangelists, and Star Wars Fandom.
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.)
But commissioning a porn artist is hard as they lost their payment providers and bank accounts, while the slop machines got off with a american authors only slap on the wrist.
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.
Eric “my new theory of physics has not maths in it” Weinstein?
Eric “I will come to Harvard and espouse Numberwang Racism if you deign to invite me” Weinstein:
Invite me back to Harvard as the co-founder of the Science and Engineering Workforce Project in the @HarvardEcon department and I will give a talk on how this really works. You don’t have to pay me a cent if you video it.
I’ll cover:
The need to fire Claudine Gay.
The need to end activist studies depts.
University Bioweapon research
String Theory
CPI Cost of Living
Evolutionary theory applied to Humans
Low Dimensional Geometry
NSF STEM Shortage Panics
DEI hiring against merit
Epstein and Science
Cognitive abilities expectations in Geographicly widely separated populations.
You’ve got to be shitting me
In using xcancel to look up Eric Weinstein’s bonkers rants on Xitter, I exposed myself to Sabine Hossenfelder’s comment section. The drivel, the fawning, the people asking chatbots about quantum gravity… It hurts, it hurts.
I am going to scrub my brain with Oliver Byrne’s edition of Euclid.
taking a bad paper too seriously
Hossenfelder starts her “Summary” section thusly:
I have shown here how the assumption that matter and geometry have the same fundamental origin requires the time evolution of a quantum state to differ from the Schrödinger equation.
This conclusion is unwarranted. It follows, not from the given assumption, but from the overcomplicated way that assumption is implemented and the kludges built on top of that. Here is how Hossenfelder introduces her central assumption:
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. […] 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.
Taking this at face value, the quantum state of a universe containing gravitating matter is just a single ray in a Hilbert space. As cosmic time rolls on, that ray rotates. This unitary evolution of the state vector is the evolution both of the matter and of the geometry. There is, by assumption, no distinction between them. But Hossenfelder hacks one in! She says that the Hilbert space must factor into the tensor product of a Hilbert space for matter and a Hilbert space for geometry. And then she says that the only allowed states are tensor products of two copies of the same vector (up to a unitary that we could define away). If matter and geometry were truly the same, there would be no such factorization. We would not have to avoid generating entanglement between the two factors by breaking quantum mechanics, as Hossenfelder does, simply because there would not be two spaces to tango.
I am skeptical of this whole approach on multiple levels, but even granting the basic premise, it’s a bad implementation of that premise. She doesn’t have a model; she has a pathological “fix” to a problem of her own making.
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!
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.”
That passage of Hossenfelder’s jumped out at me, too. It’s a laughably bad take about the implications of Bell’s theorem that ignores how just about every interpretation of quantum mechanics has responded to Bell-inequality violations, and it attempts to sanewash superdeterminism.
Reading up a bit more on “superdeterminism” I guess it explain a bit more why she made that video attempting to debunk free will Compatibilism as a cooky idea cooked up by new cooky philosophers (Not realising it’s about as ancient as western philosophy itself).
For the “esthetics” of presenting superdeterminism as a “pure-common-sense” the no free will just sells it better.
EDIT: From memory maybe it was about “Hard Compatibilism” (free will requires determinism) which might not be explicitly so old, though I would say a natural consequence of most Compatibilist positions.
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.
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.
She wrote a whole book about how physicists have deluded themselves by pursuing mathematical “beauty”, and now she’s advocating “everything is geometry”.
(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.
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.
“Mommy, who cut off Santa’s head?”
I also love that Walmart’s desperate rush to catch up in e-commerce has resulted in their website becoming just as much of a slop farm as Amazon. My friend who works there said this just piles even more on an already overstressed staff, as people come into the store not understanding that the website lists a whole lot of stuff that isn’t and never will be sold in the store. I doubt many people will come in asking for this piece of junk, tho.
“remember 1-900 numbers? They’re back! In AI form!”
Also I browsed other items on the site the phone came from and holy shit I have never seen a more cursed collection of products draped in Christmas shit.
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:
Sneer Zone Media shall TRIUMPH
the sneerpire is on the march
Dang, maybe I should get in on that. I already own a microphone and everything.
it’s so much fun! do you know what your topic might be?
Nope, not a clue.
well if some possibilities come up i hope we get to hear them
Count me as excited to see where this goes. Absolutely fascinating to see this guy dredged from the abyss of history and see how cleanly it rhymes with modern horrible. And to see that the inability of bigots to write a goddamn joke isn’t a recent loss.
Also the intro and outro compilations were beautiful. Very well done.
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)
Founders’ credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)
Taxis dating and food. Love how the ‘innovation’ of AI is now just going after the uberfication targets of last time.
And the manifesto but just makes me think that this will be the first AI to attempt a mass shooting. Unhinged ahistorical manifesto usually precludes that. ‘Roman siegeworks’ what? (This isnt about siegeworks, it is about roman discipline, they should have thought about a defensive wall from the start. (It even has a technical name which I have forgotten). Literally the wrong conclusion imho. And if you look at the wiki page, the whole story about them building the defenses in the night is just made up (also the word is ‘Contravallation’ (which was also in the manifesto image, I need new glasses)).
Also think the step from ‘victorious empire’ to ‘empire laying in ruins’ the next paragraph is just bad writing.
And a last thing, the whole fadeing in of the text/images on the site is annoying, and also breaks for me at times. Causing the images to fade in and out randomly. “Made by sleep-deprived engineers and sheer will” that tracks.
“Behind a one-way mirror,” They are watching you eat.
Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That’s how you know their food is great.
There’s more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family’s restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?
And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.
It can be done (friends and I have tried around 2007, and saw minor success until the company ran headfirst into the financial crisis and our inflexibility regarding user privacy and choice), but it’s not easy if you don’t already have money and connections.
If you do have those connections, nobody will stop you from building the stupid company of your dreams tbh.
Yeah, one is tempted to search for a historical throughline here, an axis if you will
Alesia was the turning point. With the fall of Gaul, Julius Caesar became the most powerful man in the Roman world.
We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.
There’s also a village in
aquitaineArmorica that he never properly conquered…
Translator’s note: kaikaku means flan
Also the random Bernard Arnault mention (CEO of LMVH occasionally the richest man in the world depending on how strong the stocks are) at the end is a bit odd, I’m guessing added by an LLM because of the Alesia (~Paris) angle.
So this is literally a rehash of Spyce, a CambridgeMA based startup whos first restaurant was in the old chipotle in harvard square. They had a similar setup but one that was able to make actually-hot food instead of salad bowls which were decent. (they ironically sold to sweetgreen in 2021)
fresh openwashed proprietary license hell just (well as of 2 years ago, but I’m sneering at it now) dropped:
Harmful free-riding is the sort of free-riding that leads to the free-rider problem
[…]
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature. Free riders are a problem for common pool resources because they may overuse it by not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes).
from the fucking asshats who made Sentry proprietary under the BUSL but wanted an even more nonsensical license:
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL)
Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).
I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.
fyi: some fellow forked all of the sentry stuff from when it was bsd and made it less shit to run yourself. I’d been running sentry as self hosted since it came out effectively and they made some real
questionableoutright bad architecture decisions over the years that made running sentry super annoying to get you to use the saas product. Like yes I want to use Cassandra and elastic search for my one user error loggingregardless https://glitchtip.com/
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature.
This is literally railing against the concept of altruism, kill this license with hammers (and sickles)
That Wikipedia article is cursed:
For instance, in discussions on climate change mitigation, countries with lesser contributions to greenhouse gas emissions might still benefit from global efforts to reduce emissions, enjoying a stable climate without proportionally shouldering the costs of emission reductions.
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.
yep. there’s a couple communities out there that mistake “growth” for “good”, and I get the sense that’s one of the problems fosstodon has. not the only one, mind - other stuff also appears to be impactful. I don’t have enough spoons to make a good thorough analysis of it tho :|
It’s only real fascism if the dev runs around the streets of Rome carrying a bundle of sticks, come on.
AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):
Tag your favorite name for a Star Wars background character. Mine is enodopmisch reticulum.
Ave! True to Flexor Digitorum!
Scal-Palin Skywalker, was that the guy 100 years in the future who kept smoking death sticks so Luke’s Force ghost would stop bothering him?
smouth
