Want to wade into the spooky 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
It is sunday, so time to make some posts almost nobody will see. I generated a thing:
Image description
3 screenshots from a The Simpsons episode. Bart is sitting in his class and the whole class in the first panel says “Say the line” with eyes filled with expectation and glee, next panel a sad downlooking Bart says “AI is the future and we all need to get on board”, third panel everybody but Bart cheers.
Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.
The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers
edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue
The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game’s Codex (“Starships: Heat Management” in the Secondary section, if you’re looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven’t had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody’s bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh don’t worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
KDE showing how it should be done:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html
Question:
I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.
Response:
We stopped posting on X for several reasons:
- The owner is a nazi
- The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
- (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
- Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.
Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.
We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.
common KDE W
Think some of the KDE people are old school punkers so might not be a big shock.
The follow-up’s worth mentioning too:
It’s interesting they’re citing specifically DHH and Ladybird as examples to follow, considering:
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.
cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to
If these plugs are too much, please let me know: the second episode of our podcast on historical bigoted/misogynist texts is out now. “Woman, thy name is russia.”
https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social/post/3m4cjzttdek2f
The computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they can’t put up with all your shit any more.
arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.
from the folks who brought you
we’ve trained a model to regurgitate 19th century pseudoscience
the field of computer science presents: How to destroy a public good by skipping all the required reading in your liberal arts courses
And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:
“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob
https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979
It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT
It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.
two overlapping cookie opt-out popups:
Love when this happens and on your phone you cant even reach the buttons. The lost art of testing your websites.
The lost art of testing your websites.
i run with javascript disabled by default, and it’s actually refreshing when a website at least displays “this shit requires javascript lol” instead of just not working
the modern web sucks, let’s all train ravens like asoiaf
but never a sex bot
Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says “we” he only means the present cohort of microsofties.
Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.
That post requires signing in to view; it’s a link to this: https://futurism.com/science-energy/trump-altman-plutonium-oklo
Ah apologies forgot to check.
Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
The “Weapons Grade” part is almost certainly editorializing (hopefully), but this whole shit sounds like another Chernobyl waiting to happen
This sound like cyberpunk setting backstory, to explain how the continental US came to be managed by a fickle alliance between several corporate nuclear powers.
But I’m sure everything’s gonna be fine.
i don’t think so, it’s like megatons to megawatts but stupider, instead of using up uranium from adversary they want to use up their own plutonium, while also having policies against spent fuel reprocessing (for alleged nonproliferation reasons, which is patently bullshit, power generation was straight up cheaper this way because new uranium is cheaper than reprocessing and use of mox. some other countries (at minimum ru, fr, in, pk, jp, cn, il) do reprocessing as a matter of national security/energy independence/hedge against future shortages of uranium). also this requires recertification of reactors for mox use, which won’t always work or else only part of uranium can be replaced, and if it’s for smr, then there’s gonna be a lot of plutonium in there, and it all starts with handing plutonium to motherfucking sam altman, for only a slight chance of any positive results
i see it more as current administration ripping copper wiring from walls than anything else tbh
Apologies for doing journal club instead of sneer club.
Voiseux, G., Tao Zhou, R., & Huang, H.-C. (Brad). (2025). Accepting the unacceptable in the AI era: When & how AI recommendations drive unethical decisions in organizations. Behavioral Science & Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607251384574
abstract:
In today’s workplaces, the promise of AI recommendations must be balanced against possible risks. We conducted an experiment to better understand when and how ethical concerns could arise. In total, 379 managers made either one or multiple organizational decisions with input from a human or AI source. We found that, when making multiple, simultaneous decisions, managers who received AI recommendations were more likely to exhibit lowered moral awareness, meaning reduced recognition of a situation’s moral or ethical implications, compared with those receiving human guidance. This tendency did not occur when making a single decision. In supplemental experiments, we found that receiving AI recommendations on multiple decisions increased the likelihood of making a less ethical choice. These findings highlight the importance of developing organizational policies that mitigate ethical risks posed by using AI in decision-making. Such policies could, for example, nudge employees toward recalling ethical guidelines or reduce the volume of decisions that are made simultaneously.
so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.
so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.
AI is an accountability sink by design, its technocapitalism working as designed
as a bonus, it’s also fascist!
I would adore an awful journal club tbh
long hand of casey newton (by proxy) outputs a weird hit piece on ed zitron in wired https://archive.is/chsCw so far bluesky in shambles with no other effects
Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”
Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.
In my day people were ashamed of being mad in the newspaper.
wint @dril 29 Dec 2014 and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.
i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.
on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he’ll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he’s concealing it, I don’t like the association whether he’s open about it or not.
on the… third hand? when i’ve read his posts, i’ve found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he’s an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn’t interested in trying to make that article happen
looks pretty good to me, I’d be delighted to produce this sort of work and he’s doing loadbearing work on the numbers here - that the finance press is faintly catching up to a year later.
Baldur Bjarnason’s (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.
(In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could’ve nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)
Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.
I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron
TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.
Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.
(And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).
To start this spooky Stubsack off, there’s signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:
Just a heads up I haven’t gotten a refund from my cancelled FW12 order. Framework seems to be having trouble figuring it out.
I don’t know why, maybe it is Canada or maybe it is a high volume of similar requests, but it is a sign I always find concerning in a company I am worried about the financial stability of.
Could be nothing, but if you have been wavering on a cancellation I figured you might want a heads up.
This comes two weeks after Framework’s public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. “Go fash, lose cash” proves itself again.
i’m trying to sell mine now
but also i don’t have any other computers and probably can’t afford anything
time for me to learn to use a pencil
The market should be flooded with used business laptops that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro
oh fuck, i didn’t think of that! thank you for the idea 💖
lightly used thinkpads are the classic choice for this — IT departments buy high spec ones then dump them for cheap a few years later in surplus sales or on eBay, and there are usually repair manuals and spare parts readily available. usually you can type the specific model and generation into a search and get a wiki page or at least a couple blog posts reporting how well they’re supported under linux, and Lenovo seems to intentionally do very well on compatibility since Linux compatibility is a nice checkbox for an enterprise laptop to have. just be careful you don’t get bamboozled into buying any of Lenovo’s consumer laptops, since they tend to be a fair bit cheaper and don’t have the same compatibility guarantees, repairability, or ample spare parts availability.
For sale: lenovo thinkpad, lightly used
-Earnest Hempingway
Found out about a new space junk startup today.
One bold new startup is looking to cash in on the frenzy with a particularly bizarre approach: a massive array of space mirrors meant to reflect the Sun’s light down to paying subscribers.
The company has yet to launch any of the 4,000 satellite mirrors it sold in its far-out pitch. However, the startup recently applied for a license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a 60-by-60 foot demo craft in April of 2026, Space.com reported this week. That’s after winning a $1.25 million contract from the US Air Force, of all places, on top of a $20 million Series A funding round to build out its “sunlight on demand” service, which Reflect says will “strengthen the national defense of the United States of America.”
Astronomers, however, aren’t so gung-ho about the idea of a massive space mirror blinding the Earth with Sunlight.
“The reflectors will be directing their light [even after they pass their target] because obviously they can’t shut that off,” John Berentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory told Space.com. “The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation. That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well.”@sundogplanets was posting about this not too long ago, I’ll try find the thread a bit later
e: thread
This has never been tried before and is a completely new idea.
Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible “scroll driven” web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.
Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that’s not actually necessary.
That has to be intentionally bad.
https://micahflee.com/practical-defenses-against-technofascism/ at BSidesPDX
Happy Gilmore is ruined for me.
Oreo has shoved 40 million in wads of cash between two sloppy biscuits. You see, if they don’t do it, then Hydrox is gonna partner with DeepSeek. This is just business, it’s not a bubble
Oreo: the cookie that doesn’t need a marketing department.
You know the old saw that half the money spent on marketing is wasted, just nobody knows which half? Thanks to AI we now know it’s the half that’s spent on AI.
Employee at ‘plagiarism company’ defending transition to ‘plagiarism + pushing sex content onto children company’ insists that the reason they are pushing smut slop onto kids is due to their passion for creativity.
S-tier big brain ai safety researcher chimes in:
Masterful gambit, sir. Why didn’t we consider the fact that “automating all labour would produce more revenue”?
I realize it’s been poisoned since/by coiners, but god I hate that usage of “democratize”
As usual the libertarians are saying “democratize” when they mean “commodify”.
Just pretend that it’s coming from a different root word “mocratize” meaning the opposite of whatever the fuck crypto is doing
