Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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.)
EDIT:
I’m removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.
It’s quite embarrasing, I should’ve been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it’s saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!
That’s what you get from reposting someone who has “The Finance Newsletter” in his fucking username, couldn’t have gone well for me.
original post
Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar
@V0ldek Mathematicians.
Tell me you have no idea what mathematicians do by publishing an absolute mockery of mathematics purporting to explain that mathematicians are likely to be replaced by LLMs.
@V0ldek “Farm and Home Management Educators”
WTF
I remember this paper from last summer, the authors put up a followup right when school started that distances it from the AI replacement theory: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/
I work a lot with the underlying data set they used, ONET is really carefully designed but easy to misinterpret; and also I wanted to mention that it is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been DOGE’d since then. Future research into jobs, AI or regular, will probably degrade as this continues.
before you order the cavalry charge, fwiw this skeet misrepresents the actual study topic rather badly, as another bluesky commenter notes.
Thank you.
this doesn’t mean that the paper is any good or doesn’t deserve mockery (i don’t know, i didn’t read it yet, and i’m not sure i have apparatus to make other than esthetic judgements), just that the conclusions the og skeet author attributes to the paper aren’t the paper’s conclusions.
“these ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industry”
CNC Tool Programmer is a good one and shows that Microsoft, a company that probably has paid for someone to run CNC tooling for prototyping AND supposedly makes software, didn’t do the bare minimum to understand complexeties involved by talking to that someone.
Yeah, you can make mistakes with programming this thing, it’ll happily destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling as well as potentially maiming or killing anyone standing too close while the machine is actually physically crashing. It will friction-weld your nice, expensive carbide cutting tool with cooling channels to your work piece (even if they are dissimler metals) by taking too big of a cut because it does exactly as it’s instructed.
someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they’d tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
I do believe that’s literally how the automation dystopia began in Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
I expected a willingness from HN users to backstab the working class, but I didn’t expect something this blatantly half-baked.
10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.
That’s not just smart, that’s capital-J Jenius.
Edit: removed due to this
@nightsky @V0ldek Well to be honest I think they just have general disdain for us subhumans for not scamming or inheriting our way to fortune.
On a lighter note, cool Turrican avatar. Loved that game as a kid.
Yesss, and it’s still worth playing today!
@V0ldek@awful.systems @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems I see how you might find historians ridiculous but have you considered… proofreaders?
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Archivists are less at risk than historians? Quality thought went into this.
Also mathematicians - have they seen how LLMs “solve” problems.
@V0ldek @cstross I couldn’t even read the whole list after seeing “CNC Programmers” on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of “here’s a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that we’re using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination box” makes Willy’s Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there’s video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
@geeksam
*Leaded* glass, I hope! It’s only a matter of time before someone in the Hegseth DoD decides this will be excellent for machining plutonium pits.
@V0ldek @cstross
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!
Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but there’s little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross
Safety glass Hell: I’d insist on remote cameras and several feet of reinforced concrete.
Meanwhile, I’m lookin at the list and amazed by the number of “jobs” I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasn’t evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
CC: @V0ldek@awful.systems @cstross@wandering.shop
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story can’t read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
“Can’t read” is the kind of insult we don’t need in this context.
Passenger Attendants
Hosts and Hostesses
Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.
LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
Seems like Sales Representatives for Services could go wrong in an infinite loop of stuff companies don’t want, stuff companies can’t do, stuff nobody asked for, and probably crimes against humanity.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Models?! The very form that captures AI and large language?! Models?!
So AI LLMs are at risk of destroying themselves?
How poetic.
@BlueMonday1984 @V0ldek
Historians definitely stood out to me, but also data scientists. The glorified grammar auto-complete that can’t do math is expected to do statistical analysis??
Most of the routine data analysis has already been “vendorized”, AI won’t make a difference. Why run an A/B test manually when you can drop Optimizely on to your page and let it run. I mean, /I/ know why I would, but I doubt a PM would.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
better read the study yourself, here https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
@V0ldek Oh no, what will happen to the ::checks notes:: switchboard operation industry??
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Lol at “historians”
@dajb @V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
“He who controls the past controls the future.” much?
(This is the run-up to that: “Who controls the present controls the past.”)
Switchboard operators?
@V0ldek yeah, who needs historians anyway. nobody listens to them or watches their tiktok feed …
but “hosts an hostesses” … what do they mean by this?