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 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.)

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    22
    Ā·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Today in Seems Legit News:

    ā€œAs a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,ā€ Sƶderstrƶm said. ā€œAnd once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.ā€

    • why is engineer working before contracted time
    • if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
    • if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
    • if ā€œno engineer has written a line of code since Decemberā€, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
    • why is hypothetical engineer a ā€œheā€, Spotify
    • do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
    • in unrelated news, Anna’s Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
    • though I won’t do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is ā€œAIā€ ā€œmusicā€ anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
    • nightsky@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      Even if you’ve never heard of him before and know nothing else about him… this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.

    • lurker@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      in follow-up posts he talks about how he’s broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that ā€œif it were a 1950’s government and congress I’d be more hopefulā€

      …so instead of proposing a solution like ā€œprotest against thisā€ or ā€œvote people in power who actually are responsibleā€ he jumps to ā€œyour daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholdersā€

      with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market is… what’s the superlative of ā€œlolzā€?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.

      • swlabr@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        It’s his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence ā€œall the yud.ā€ From his twitter bio:

        This is my serious low-volume account. Follow @allTheYud for the rest.

  • lurker@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you

  • nfultz@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    I did a five line PR to a little shell util I’ve used for a decade or so, and bickered with the stupid PR bot. Fuck you kody, you have bad taste, go away, go back to enterprise.

    I want to force feed it Worse is Better until it chokes, surely that’s in its corpus somewhere.

    ok done venting

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).

    I’m not quite clear on what ā€œself-growingā€ means here given how inhospitable the moon is.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      Ā·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.

      If only more journalists go: ā€˜we don’t know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at us’.

      given how inhospitable the moon is.

      You could even say she is a harsh mistress.

      • V0ldek@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        9
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        Given it’s the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          7
          Ā·
          6 months ago

          Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.

          Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole ā€˜what if you need to flip a switch or replace a fan’ problem.

          • V0ldek@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            11
            Ā·
            6 months ago

            The moment I’ve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. It’s really all you need to know about them.

            • gerikson@awful.systems
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              8
              Ā·
              6 months ago

              wasn’t Musk financing people who were gonna ā€œhack the simulationā€ at one point?

              • Soyweiser@awful.systems
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                5
                Ā·
                edit-2
                6 months ago

                Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isn’t in a healthy place mentally.

                E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because space is cool.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.

      • rook@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…

        It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.

        as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this ā€œrevolutionaryā€ ā€œforward-thinkingā€ idea

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        the virile space men will have

        i’ve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinlein’s luna stories and miss the point entirely

      • ShakingMyHead@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        Ā·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.

    • Jasper@mastodon.pointless.net
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      @BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the ā€œOld Dreamsā€ is self replication lunar factories - you land a small robotic factory on the moon, it makes copies of itself, those copies make copies, exponential growth, then the factories make a maglev launch system and then they make and launch a massive number of solar panels, and now you do space based solar power and beam the power to earth. Kept growing and building, and you have massive amounts of energy per human on earth with 0 pollution…

  • V0ldek@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    Ā·
    edit-2
    6 months ago

    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 ā€œThe Finance Newsletterā€ in his fucking username, couldn’t have gone well for me.

    original post

    From https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3mek7wsqgkk26

    Microsoft released a study showing the 40 jobs most at risk by AI:

    Tag the most ridiculous entry, I am curious of your choices.

    To me it has to be fucking historians. Arriving at new conclusions by looking at available evidence and/or finding obscure references that are not well known to the public – CLASSIC THING LLMS ARE GOOD AT.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        Ā·
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        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.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      ā€œthese ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industryā€

      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.

      • gerikson@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        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

        • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          Ā·
          6 months ago

          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 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.

    • V0ldek@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar

      • gerikson@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        Don’t feel bad, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid being duped in the future.

        • V0ldek@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          Ā·
          6 months ago

          But unlike those that have fallen to hubris I am built different and should be immune to disinformation!

    • The Janx Devil@sfba.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      @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.

    • gerikson@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      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

    • nfultz@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      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.

    • Sam Livingston-Gray@ruby.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      Ā·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      @V0ldek @cstross I couldn’t even read the whole list after seeing ā€œCNC Programmersā€ on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of ā€œhere’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 boxā€ makes Willy’s Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there’s video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.

      • nfultz@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        Most of the routine data analysis has already been ā€œvendorizedā€, 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.

    • istewart@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      Cool! I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because IIRC that’s the latest date for a singularity that Kurzweil gives, and this dude comes along with a date that’s conveniently ~halfway between now and then for people to anchor on. Thanks dude! If I find an online sod retailer that sells single square feet, I’ll send you some grass to touch!

        • istewart@awful.systems
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          Ā·
          6 months ago

          He might have revised it in more recent publications and/or brainfarts. If I were a Responsible Internet Debaterā„¢, I would go check, but the whole point is that i could give a fuck

          • lurker@awful.systems
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            7
            Ā·
            edit-2
            6 months ago

            managed to find my source

            funny how all the tech CEOs are the ones who are saying in the next couple years and all the researchers give 10-20 year timelines. surely this does not mean anything about the reliability of the companies and their claims

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      You could’ve probably given me a good 80~100 rounds and I still would not have guessed that set of items

      And I’ve been watching these dipshits for a while

      (the first two I could’ve guessed/converged to within 10~20 I suspect, but a chinchilla? Fucked from left field, I tell ya)

    • gerikson@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      2034 eh?

      I recently purchased a couple of decent red wines with the intent to age them appropriately. Vendor said 8 years was good, so I Sharpied ā€œ'34ā€ on the label and felt really really old when I did so.

      Anyway, 18 Jul 2034 is as good a date as any to uncork one of them to enjoy. Marked my calendar!

      • lurker@awful.systems
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        Ā·
        6 months ago

        2034 is also the year superintelligence is gonna happen according to the updated predictions from the AI 2027 crew, so double whammy!

  • flere-imsaho@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    here’s another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.

    (the answer is ā€œnot exactlyā€, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      The whole thing’s worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:

      Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think they’re maximising their own personal benefit.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      I like this reply on Reddit:

      I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.

      I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don’t care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.

      This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff’s economic paper with the Excel error).

  • Evinceo@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    I was trying to see if Paul Graham was in the Epstein files (seems to mostly be due to Twitter spam) but then I found this email from 2016 with Scooter’s powerword:

    https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 9/EFTA00824072.pdf

    The context is that AI guy Joscha Bach wants to ā€œhave a brainstormā€ on ā€œforbidden researchā€ (you best believe IQ is in there, but also climate change prepping which in phrased in a particularly omenous fashion) and there’s a long list of people at the end. Besides slatescott it includes

    Epstein Himself Paul Graham Max Teigmark Stephen Wolfram Stephen Pinker (ofc) Reid Hoffman

    It’s unclear if this brainstorm ever happened or if Astral Scottdex was even contacted. The next email features Epstein chastising Joscha Bach for not shutting up in a discussion with Noam Chomsky and Bach’s last email is just groveling and trying to smooth over the relationship with his benefactor.

    I think this is (at least a little bit) interesting because it’s back in 2016, a year before ā€˜intellectual dark web’ was coined and that whole ball got rolling.

    Has Scooter addressed his presence in the files the way other-scott did?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      the way other-scott did?

      Did he?

      Now I’m wondering if ā€˜third Scott’ (Guess he didn’t fake it, his dream of being hunted in the streets as a conservative didn’t come to pass) was in the files. Would be very amusing if it turned out Epstein was one of the people hypnotized.

      ā€˜intellectual dark web’

      But this was after people coined ā€˜Dark Enlightenment’, which I don’t know when it started, but it was mapped in 2013. Wonder how much the NRx comes up. But for my sanity I’m not going to do any digging.

      (people already discovered some unreadable pdf files are unreadable because they are actually renamed mp4s (and other file types), fucking amateurs podcasters. And no way im going to look into that).

    • sc_griffith@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      Ā·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      this is some of the most shameful groveling I’ve ever seen. what a pathetic toad

      given how epstein ignores his proposal in favor of slapping him down i would be surprised if any of it came to fruition

  • fnix@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.

    For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      Ā·
      edit-2
      6 months ago

      Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).

      Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.

    • jaschop@awful.systems
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      Ā·
      6 months ago

      but I do know that what’s available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.

      Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.

      It’s telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, it’s so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?

  • sansruse@awful.systems
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    Ā·
    6 months ago

    https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421

    Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.