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.)

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    24·
    13 days ago

    Today in Seems Legit News:

    “As 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,” Söderström said. “And 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.”

    • 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 “no engineer has written a line of code since December”, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
    • why is hypothetical engineer a “he”, 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 “AI” “music” anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    18 days ago

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

    I’m not quite clear on what “self-growing” means here given how inhospitable the moon is.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      20·
      17 days 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: ‘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.systemsEnglish
        10·
        17 days 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.systemsEnglish
          7·
          17 days 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 ‘what if you need to flip a switch or replace a fan’ problem.

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            12·
            17 days 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.

              • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                7·
                16 days 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 vacuum.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      18 days 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.

      self-growing

      the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        18 days 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 “revolutionary” “forward-thinking” idea

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        17 days 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.

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        17 days 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.systemsEnglish
        4·
        16 days 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
      3·
      15 days ago

      @BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the “Old Dreams” 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…

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      16 days 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 “if it were a 1950’s government and congress I’d be more hopeful”

      …so instead of proposing a solution like “protest against this” or “vote people in power who actually are responsible” he jumps to “your daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholders”

      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.systemsEnglish
        8·
        15 days 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 “lolz”?

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      15 days 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.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      16 days 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.systemsEnglish
        11·
        16 days ago

        It’s his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence “all the yud.” From his twitter bio:

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

  • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    15 days 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.

    • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      15 days 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?

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      15 days 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.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    12 days ago

    Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:

    But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse

    So… East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn’t rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.

    And if there’s a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn’t that the Japanese?

    I’m open to input on either side, I admit I don’t know too much about these issues.

    • fiat_lux@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      11 days ago

      I’m not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldn’t find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mile’s walk.

      It’s true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isn’t in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured aren’t exactly top choices to begin with.

      Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.

      Also no, you won’t find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so I’m not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.

      The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of “fact” scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.

      • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        14 days ago

        But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)…I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.

        Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    17 days 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

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    14 days ago

    Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

    In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

    Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

  • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    17 days ago

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

    (the answer is “not exactly”, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      12·
      17 days 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.

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    15 days 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 “The Finance Newsletter” 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.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      14 days 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.systemsEnglish
    11·
    13 days 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 “have a brainstorm” on “forbidden research” (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 ‘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.systemsEnglish
      8·
      12 days ago

      the way other-scott did?

      Did he?

      Now I’m wondering if ‘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.

      ‘intellectual dark web’

      But this was after people coined ‘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.systemsEnglish
      7·
      12 days 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