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.)
In lighter news, this anti-LLM rhyme made me chuckle:
I will not talk with a chatbot
I do not want it while I shopI do not want it on Windows X-box
I do not want it in FirefoxI do not want it in my house
I do not want it on my mouse
I do not want it here or there
I do not want it anywhere.I do not want AI and Spam
I do not want them Sam-Alt-ManAmazon unveils AI-Powered AR glasses for delivery drivers.
The response I’ve seen from actual drivers has been somewhere between “eh? I guess?” and “fuck you, pay me”.
I literally can’t even.
As someone who spent countless hours of my youth in hammer, laying out areas with props and lighting and doing play testing about areal movement with test npcs, it’s hilarious that these people see this slop and say, yes this is the future.
also : “I’m working on a theory that “AI is art” boosters have some kind of limited ability to perceive details. Like they literally only perceive large shapes, colors, and noises. Anything remotely more detailed than ‘big thing go boom’ they actually lack the ability to see it.” 🤔🤔🤔
Level design, color palette, continuity, assets and physics by a bowl of salvia
Salvia, LSD, peyote, and three hallucinogens unknown to science.
Also: They made a “game” that is 100% glitches.
Oh, so Call of Duty
The video game equivalent of
For something lighter, here’s an AI bro getting wowed by the shittiest “video game” I’ve ever seen (trust me, the screenshot doesn’t do it justice):
In lieu of sneering this shit, I’d like to argue that arts education should become mandatory for all students post-bubble, regardless of their profession. STEM, humanities, tech, doesn’t matter - give them four years of art so they don’t turn out like this guy.
JFC some CSAM collector stormed a Wikipedia conference with a gun https://slate.com/technology/2025/10/wikipedia-editors-conference-gunman-culture-war.html
Wow. What a statement:
“At the end of the day, Omarchy is a developer vanity project with marketing polish. A beautifully themed, slightly dangerous, over-engineered dotfile bomb.”
https://eepy.moe/notes/ae7rhgxvpw8d09kw
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Naturally, the worst people on that thread are praising it - for example, here’s the “DHH destroying Basecamp is based” guy whining about people not accepting outright fascists:
100% certain this dork has the wikipedia page for logical fallacies open 24/7
The fact that a mod named “catastrophe” did this is morbidly funny to me.
Anyways, whatever doubts I (or anyone had) about Framework are basically gone. I hope Nirav and the Framework team enjoy their Nazi bar.
just once i want to buy a computery thing and not have it end up being fasctech
i was so excited about this laptop 😭
MNT Reform’s doing a similar thing to Framework, but its nowhere near what they offered. The team is completely free of venture capital, and its got a non-binary head representing it, so it should be safe from a fashtech turn.
this is cool, but honestly, after the red hat/fedora announcement that they’ll allow slop contributions, i may just try and use my phone for everything
android 16 QPR1 gets a proper desktop mode and it should get ported to grapheneos soon enough
this is just copium, of course. thank you for sharing the link to the mnt reform. <3
@BlueMonday1984 @Seminar2250 LGBTQ is no protection from fascism. Pim Fortuyn, the predecessor to Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, was gay.
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today in I fucking called it fedora aka mostly red hat has decided to allow slop code in a way that violates even their utterly mid stated principles around the tech
if you’re downstream from any fedora packages (and I don’t know the scope of this policy so it might be safe to consider anything owned by red hat in general to be tainted — yes I realize most of us are downstream from a bunch of red hat shit) it might be time to evaluate an alternative if available
among others, so many systemd and libvirt things :|
fortunately a long-ish tail on a lot of that, but fucking still
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I am the scream
Kinda interesting that Google’s TPUs are back in the news. Seemed like they had fallen by the wayside for a while. Of course there are no technical details, just blah blah revenue blah blah, but that’s CNBC for you.
Charities Using AI-Generated Photos of Starving Children to Raise Money
Morally, attacking the poor and downtrodden through polluting the world with AI is abhorrent, and anyone doing this should be permanently barred from working at any charity.
Practically, the sight of blatant AI-generated poverty porn is going to drive people away from giving to these charities, damaging their ability to do good.
Trump freed Binance fraudster, SBF pardon futures mooning rn
Does anyone else get flashbacks to that episode of the Powerpuff girls where the villain takes over the city and makes a law that “crime is now legal”? Because that keeps popping into my head for some reason.
Oh boy, another AI doom video popped up on my feed. Time for more morbid curiosity. The topic is about Big Yud and Nate Soares’s new book (“If You Build It, Everyone Dies”) about how AI is gonna kill us all. I have better things to waste 30 minutes on, so I’m not watching the full video, but the thumbnail (“The 7 Minute War”) kinda suggests what the contents are gonna be.
Thankfully, the description of the video has a Google doc with their sources! I’m sure it’s full of hard evidence from careful experiments that logically demonstrate why their doomsday scenario is something to worry about, not just a random assortment of Anthropic blog posts and completely unrelated events.
Somehow, there are a bunch of sources for the first 2 minutes of the video.
“In the New York Times’ best-selling book, which was endorsed by Nobel laureates and the godfathers of AI” Geoffrey Hinton — Personal estimate >50% existential risk.
Geoffrey “All radiologists will be replaced in 5 years” Hinton, Nobel laureate in physics, famous for his work in … physics.
“researchers from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute describe in detail one potential example future” Machine Intelligence Research Institute — The Sable scenario from If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Yudkowsky & Soares. Fictional narrative illustrating risks, not prediction.
This is not the first we’ve seen from MIRI, and I have a feeling it will not be the last. The monster under my bed is a fictional narrative illustrating risks, not prediction.
“AI researchers have known this has been potentially a very bad idea since at least 2024” Anthropic/Apollo Research — Multiple 2024 papers document deceptive/self-preserving behaviors in controlled evaluations.
They are still trying to flog the Anthropic/Apollo Research claims that chatbots will lie to you if you tell them to lie to you.
“They spin up 200,000 GPUs and let Sable think for 16 hours straight” xAI/NVIDIA — Colossus supercomputer in Memphis scaling toward ~200,000 GPUs for Grok training.
What does this even demonstrate? Some people can do some stuff with some GPUs? I ate some oatmeal today. Now everyone should be thoroughly convinced of my oatmeal-eating abilities.
I watched for a few seconds around the timestamp, and it seems to be the beginning of their scifi story, I mean, AGI scenario. Yes, if you want to convince people that your scenario is plausible, I’m sure this is the part that you need serious amounts of evidence for. Remember, almost half the sources have timestamps for the first two minutes of the video.
“a stunt to see if Sable can crack famous math problems like the Riemann hypothesis” Clay Mathematics Institute — Riemann Hypothesis remains unsolved after 160+ years, considered most famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics.
Again, what does this demonstrate? I tried solving P vs NP with a cheeseburger. That didn’t work either. The only purpose of mentioning this is for narrative window dressing, because Math Is For Smart People.
These are the sources for just the first two minutes. After that, they get a bit sparse.
“Back in 2024, smaller models showed flashes of the same behavior” Multiple Papers — Documented deception/scheming findings in frontier models.
“Claude 3.7 was caught repeatedly cheating on coding tasks even when told to stop”
More Anthropic blog posts and system cards? Come on, I can’t sneer the same thing twice in one post!
“Steal cryptocurrency from weak exchanges just like hackers did to Mt. Gox in 2011” U.S. Department of Justice — Russian nationals charged for 2011 Mt. Gox hack. 647,000-850,000 BTC stolen.
I don’t know what this has to do with supporting the validity of their AI doomsday scenario, but kudos to them for showing why cryptocurrency is also stupid, I guess.
“or Bybit in 2025” Reuters/FBI — Largest cryptocurrency theft to date. FBI attributed to North Korean Lazarus Group.
More? I guess this is hard evidence for showing why cryptocurrency is stupid. I still don’t understand how this demonstrates that AI is scary.
“Reminder, this scenario is based on years of technical research by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, laid out in the book If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” MIRI — Meta-commentary explaining the scenario is illustrative, not predictive.
I knew MIRI would be back. It’s illustrative, not predictive! Please don’t blame us if none of this even remotely happens! But it’s based on years of technical research. An entire graduate student’s worth of output in a decade.
“In 2023, a human gave an LLM access to the internet and created an X account, Terminal of Truths, which gained hundreds of thousands of followers and launched its own crypto meme coin that reached a literal billion dollar market cap” Terminal of Truths — Real-world example of AI agent gaining social media following and wealth.
The link they give references … another one of their own videos. You really are not beating the circular reference allegations here. Even if the purported story is somehow accurate, this again demonstrates how cryptocurrency is stupid. At least they use an LLM as a prop this time.
“Gain of function research. Any one of them could be hijacked to unleash catastrophe.” Science/CIDRAP — Fouchier and Kawaoka created ferret-transmissible H5N1. Controversial GOF research began 2011.
I think Yud is obsessed with this topic in particular. Better than diamondoid bacteria, I guess. Again, the AI just magically comes in and uses this stuff somehow.
“The number one and number two most cited living scientists across all fields think scenarios like this are not only possible but likely to happen. And the average AI researcher thinks there is a 16% chance of AI causing human extinction.”
Okay, let me be completely serious for this one. What would someone do if they truly believed that their work would lead to a horrible disaster, such as the extinction of humanity? Would they continue to work in the field, let alone make enough contributions to rise to the top? Alright I’m done.
ahem. h5n1 for ferrets was probably made because ferrets turn out to have immune systems similar enough to humans, in that they do get (common strains of) flu and transmit it by sneezing, that is ferrets are good model organisms for flu vaccine development. so if regular ferrets don’t catch h5n1, then you have to modify either virus or ferret because otherwise it won’t work. it’s not some random virologist deciding to wage biological war against fuzzy noodle critters
The number one and number two most cited living scientists across all fields think scenarios like this are not only possible but likely to happen. And the average AI researcher thinks there is a 16% chance of AI causing human extinction.
assigning a number to it makes it scientific
aside/rant
i wonder to what extent this bullshit works because of people’s fear of math
i wish i could convince people that STEM skills are no different than a law degree, in essence — you’ll meet dipshits that are excellent mathematicians and you’ll meet smart people that are mediocre mathematicians. i suspect it’s because people view mathematical notation as impenetrable (when that just depends on the same shit any technical writing depends on, like the writer’s skill at communicating, the reader’s familiarity and strength with the prerequisite material, etc.)
it’s frustrating, given the number of stupid mathematicians i’ve met
The Oppenheimers we have at home
openai released their spyware browser and it is… not good
https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/
But of course they named it “atlas”. Openai is clearly the work randian supermen.
Also, anil sounds like he might be a little out of touch with regards to how people search these days. Careful keyword searching isn’t even as useful as it used to be, given the damage google et al have done to their own products.
(also also, interactive fiction has marched on a little since zork and infocom were the latest and greatest things, but I accept that most people won’t have noticed)
Adding insult to injury, OpenAI’s also encouraging people to abuse ARIA tags so their slopbots can steal more effectively, threatening to damage web accessibility in the process:
https://adrianroselli.com/2025/10/openai-aria-and-seo-making-the-web-worse.html
look at the depth of this grifting
a whole One (1!) H100! in space!
note how it mentions nearly absolute fucking nothing about the supporting cast. about storage and networking, about interface capabilities, what kind of programmatic runtimes you could have! none of it. just gonna yeet a sat into space, problem solved! space DCs!
compute! in space! “what do you mean ‘compute what’? compute!” I hear, as the jackass rapidly packs up their briefcase and starts edging towards the door. who needs to care about getting data to and from such a device? it’ll run Gemma![0] magic!
SAR, in particular, generates lots of data — about 10 gigabytes per second, according to Johnston — so in-space inference would be especially beneficial when creating these maps.
scan-time “inference”, like you’d definitely know every parameter you’d want to query and every result you’d want to have, first-time, at scan! there’s a fucking reason this shit gets turned into datasets, and that the tooling around processing it is as extensive as it is.
and, again, this leaves aside all the other practical problems. of which there are many. even just the following ones should make you wince: launch, maintenance, power, heat dissipation (vacuum is an insulator!), repair, (usable) lifetime, radiation. and that’s before even touching on the nuances in those, or going further on the list
good god.
I guess the one good bit here is that it isn’t the “we’re gonna micromachine them in orbit!” bullshit fantasy, but I bet that’s not far behind
[0] - “multimodal and wide language support” so literally a Local LLM, but that means it needs… input… and… response… which again goes back to all those pesky “interaction” and “network” and “storage” questions.
(vacuum is an insulator!)
This is something the writers of the Mass Effect series got right, and they were doing a sci-fi trilogy, not handling a literal space mission!
@froztbyte but this article clearly states that the vacuum is an advantage!
> Instead of relying on fresh water for cooling through evaporation towers, as many Earth-based data centers do, Starcloud’s space-based data centers can use the vacuum of deep space as an infinite heat sink.
<cry>
just as the tshirt goes: my opening sentence was not for nothing
This will be easy thanks to the “Benevolence of the Rocket” equation as seen on Trashfuture.
Tf is a sneer machine
unless they talk about ukraine, then they’re just a bunch of sorry vatniks.
Oof, really?
unfortunately. hard to say if this is caused by them being primarily contrarians or because alice is too much into warsaw pact nostalgia, or because it’s edgy; edgelordism and reflexive contrarianism cause so many people to lose the contact with reality.
Heh I haven’t seen that, will have to go look
If we knew how to use hot air for rocket propulsion we could just shove saltman et al in there and solve multiple problems at once…alas
@froztbyte Maybe it’ll mine bitcoin?
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this reminds me of that episode of justice league unlimited where the superheroes are all on a satellite and batman says getting it built was just
a line item in the Wayne Industries R&D budget
though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working
though, to be fair, that explanation is more plausible than starcloud working
Batman’s superpower is being a billionaire, there was probably some Shenaniganstm involved
i don’t think it’s fair to assume that a billionaire who dresses up like a bat to extra-legally fight crime necessarily engages in shenanigans when donating a satellite to his vigilante friends
@froztbyte “vacuum is an insulator” oh well TIL
Yeah heat management in space turns out to be pretty fucking hard. You could ask “who knew?!” but there’s that whole space program thing…
I presume that they’re not in fact blind to this fact, mind you. You cannot be doing actual astro tech design without it (your object would never make it to launch - there’s too many blockers that’d stop it), but the properties of heat generation from a H100 are known, and thus whatever they’re applying to deal with it very can’t be lightweight/little
@froztbyte thats one thing but im still interested in the physics of the insulatory effects of the vacuum 👀
no matter means no heat transmission through conduction (=particle motion), only radiation
@Reach_the_man so wait, is not heat a form of energy (or a result thereof)? can energy not dissipate through a vacuum?
or is it that the energy dissipates less effectively when it can’t transfer itself *as heat* through a medium?
heat is describing the average kinetic energy of the material’s particles, with no contact it can’t transfer as kinetic energy, only through photons emitted
@Reach_the_man that clears it up for me! thanks for taking the time to answer
@xyhhx @froztbyte “vacuum is an insulator” is what makes a high-quality double-walled thermos high quality — there is no air between the outer and inner walls
@benchase oh shit, i knew that (when shopping for water bottles) but didn’t put two and two together
exactly so :)
