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.)
(edit: advance warning that clicking these links might cause eyestrain and trigger rage)
so for a while now sheer outrageous ludicrous nonsense of the trumpist-era USA politics has been making a bit of an impact on the local ZA racists (and, weirdly, not only the white nationalists but also the black nationalists - some of it has shone through in EFF and BFLF propaganda strains), and I knew that with the orange godawful-king ascension to his hoped-throne it was only a matter of time before shit here escalated
anyway, it’s happened. the same organisation also put up some ads along the main highway ahead of the G20 summit
(upside: some of those have already been pulled down. downside: the org put up some more. don’t know what’s happened with the latest yet)
fuck these people
SoftBank Cashes Out Nvidia Stock (Archive)
I’m too jaded to get my hopes up, but wouldn’t it be so nice if this were the beginning of the end for the AI bubble?
Either they’re right, and the bubble pops soon, or they’re too early and it’s another hilarious Softbank L
A fact-generative AI, you say? https://aphyr.com/posts/398-the-future-of-fact-checking-is-lies-i-guess
TIHI
I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.
Via Reddit!SneerClub: “Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts”
Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideas” are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. “Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.”
Fun article.
Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending “merge” between humans and machines – which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging “an electrode into the brain”.
Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that’s even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.
Pretty sure this brand of cyborg fantasizing is quite popular in mainstream rationalism, unless you’re reading something more creative in this than superbabies, brain uploading and HDMI to visual nerve for undetectable on-demand pornography.
‘Genetic engineering to merge with machines’ is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I don’t think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.
Simplest explanation I guess is he’s just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and that’s about as deep as it goes.
Some Chat-GPT user queries were leaked via some Google Search Analytics owned by websites that ranked on the search result pages that Chat-GPT saw when searching: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/oddest-chatgpt-leaks-yet-cringey-chat-logs-found-in-google-analytics-tool/
Or something like that. It’s a little confusing.
Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.
Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders’ themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!
Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about
Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):
Image description
Two people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:
“It could be the work of the French!”
“Or the Dutch”
“Could even be the British!”
“Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!”
“The Russ…”
“Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch”
you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren’t quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,
You flatter me, I haven’t thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.
Geweldig!
I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?
New singularity dropped and I’d missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents
I don’t really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.
users trade off decision quality against effort reduction
They should put that on the species’ gravestone.
Just so we all know, not liking AI slop code is xenophobic.
Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.
E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit
Link back to last week: https://awful.systems/post/6153095
thanks! I tried to link it in the usual way, but I think a bug might have blanked the url box before I hit post.
Beff Jezos and friends have produced something other than tweets. Possibly. Maybe.
What’s the elevator pitch for Extropic again? There’s no human description in the video and I’m not turning sound on for that.
What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.
Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.
“what if computation was more wrong but on the other hand was faster and used less power”?
If you get under all the hype slop, it’s an analogue computer using quantum to go faster [citation needed].
This can allegedly be used to do AI computations (so matrix math?) with lower energy.
At least they don’t claim to be doing qubits.
If you’re having yield problems, talk to that dude with his nose uncovered in the clean room @4:18
Pivot to bio-computing
Trad wives exchanging starter cultures for artisinal CPU wafers
Everything about this screams vaporware.
Extropic have been burning their runway, this is 100% an investor pitch. “We have a thing! please give us more money? we swear we’re still Nazis”
is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?
oh you fucking know it
also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal
On this topic I’ve been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?
nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.
when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki
i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine
I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it’s also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn’t even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.
Just saw this post on DHH, it’s really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html
If you’re not careful, one day you will wake up and find that you’ve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.
David Hamburger-Helper
Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.
