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 ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ 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)

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
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    11 days ago

    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, ā€œwill be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lolā€. 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,

    ā€œOh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle theā€, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, ā€œMATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing andā€¦ā€. 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 ā€˜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 ā€œhaha yeah, mathlab is hardā€.

    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.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      10 days ago

      A) ā€œWhy 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.ā€ -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.

    • Enema Cowboy@dotnet.social
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      11 days ago

      @mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984

      ā€œMicrosoft Excel…would ā€˜smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.ā€

  • nightsky@awful.systems
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    13 days ago

    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.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      13 days ago

      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.

    • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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      13 days ago

      I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systems
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    8 days ago

    EA Star Wars pitch

    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

  • rook@awful.systems
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    9 days ago

    Little table of ā€œai fluencyā€ 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 ā€œunacceptableā€, 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?

    • scruiser@awful.systems
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      11 days ago

      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 ā€œdon’t be evilā€, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.

  • rook@awful.systems
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    12 days ago

    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 (ā€œyou must be prompting it wrongā€), 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 ā€œneural howlroundā€ 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.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    9 days ago

    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

    https://archive.is/cKxyV

    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. ā€œChina just won,ā€ 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.

    • self@awful.systems
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      12 days ago

      I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        12 days ago

        I bet you’re right on the money.

        Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it’s so good, which tickled me

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        12 days ago

        Special bootlicking points:

        Source: xcancel.com

        @PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog

        @tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.

        For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        12 days ago

        (e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)

    • FredFig@awful.systems
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      12 days ago

      This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.

      I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.

    • zogwarg@awful.systems
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      12 days ago

      Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:

      Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again

      Why the bash hate?

      • o7___o7@awful.systems
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        12 days ago

        Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire

      • antifuchs@awful.systems
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        11 days ago

        Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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        8 days ago

        speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, it’s a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because it’s made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.

        • bitofhope@awful.systems
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          8 days ago

          make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

          Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

          If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

          It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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          11 days ago

          I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, ā€œget gudā€. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
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            10 days ago

            fwiw, there’s a telling detail about ptaček’s attitude to people who he doesn’t see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when he’s not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.

            it’s either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    10 days ago

    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.

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    13 days ago

    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.