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 “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. Also, happy April Fool’s in advance.)
a good vibe coding sneer found in the wild
Australian chemist and videographer Explosions & Fire argues convincingly that the ongoing recent radioactive-boy-scout scandal should not result in prosecution. For context, a 24-year-old man ordered small samples of radioactive isotopes from the USA, Australia failed to intercept it at the border, and they are prosecuting him in order to avoid embarrassment over incompetence. I don’t have a choice sneer; E&F is unwaveringly energized over the topic of radioactive isotopes and injustice, and the whole thing is worth watching.
AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?
Published in Science… Advances
Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I’m missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn’t appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.
At a <30s glance, I’m going to guess the model is finding correlations in the artefacts of fingerprint taking, digitalisation, presentation and so on instead of fingerprints proper, like every damn time this sort of story comes up.
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”
This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off
Holy smokes
there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don’t work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don’t work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat
the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it’s not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i’m effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn’t help that thiel’s people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don’t have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don’t need to work at all. ukrainians don’t have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn’t work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.
this is the disruption they’re cooking. invest in eastern europe or something
@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: “I never thought *my* hed would get cut off,” sobs CEO of Cuttin’ Off Heds, Inc.
Maximilien Robespierre
@bitofhope Indeed.
I’ve already depicted you as the virgin Robespierre… and that’s the limit of my knowledge wrt figures in the french revolution.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It’s a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolution…
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 He is a Nazi with lots of cash.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
He’s an Asshole
@sailor_sega_saturn Yeah, let’s start right with those who say such things!
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.
@sailor_sega_saturn @cstross it’s a reverse revolution: the ultra rich cutting the heads of the poor.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/
Of course it’s the dweebiest looking one.
Thats the same place the 764 people came out of.
their thesis might be right, their guess as to the subjects of the sentence however…
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 he’s not wrong about that
@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
Better them than us.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 we should make sure he is at the head of the line…
@hub @sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Is it too early for head jokes?
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a journalist wants to ask me about Urbit. Should I install Urbit so I can at least say I’ve tried it and can speak authoritatively?
[ ] no
[ ] hell no
[ ] jesus h. christ no whyi just had a 1.5 hour half-hour chat with another journalist about the Fucking Rationalists
i have a call with a third one scheduled for tomorrow
i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers
at least it’ll be these suckers’ job to do the explaining while i rant
fuck. it’s rationalist season
“i have followed these fucks for 15 years in detail and i still don’t know how to properly explain them to our lovely pivot-to-ai readers”
Personally, focusing on their whacko beliefs around the Impending AI Apocalypsetm seems like a good place to start.
“Yudkowsky sincerely believes the following. You’ll recognise it because Altman uses it as marketing buzzwords.”
“This Is What Yudkowsky Actually Believes” seems like a subtitle that would get heavy use in a future episode of South Park about Cartman dropping out after one semester at community college.
If South Park ever does get around to TESCREAL, I imagine Parker and Stone would have a goddamn field day with them.
No idea where they would land on what to mock and what to take seriously from this whole mess.
Don’t know what they’re up to these days but last time I checked I had them pegged as enlightened centrists whose style of satire is having strong beliefs about stuff is cringe more than it is ever having to say anything of even accidental substance about said things.
“imagine a perfectly spherical chud of uniform duncity…”
@dgerard @BlueMonday1984 I’ve been following them for 35 years—hell, I hung out with Curtis Yarvin on usenet in the early 90s, visited him and fondled his lizard once in '93—and the only way I can explain them is that they’re larping a bad post-cyberpunk novel and aren’t entirely clear on the whole concept of “fiction”.
As a fellow Usenet junkie from way back, now I’m curious which newsgroups Yarvin hung out in.
@TinyTimmyTokyo alt.peeves, alt.tasteless, probably most of the comp.* hierarchy, not sure where else.
I also legitimately can’t tell the degree to which they don’t understand they’re LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that’s why it’s gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted It’s probably a mixture: some of them understand the relationship between beliefs and reality, a whole bunch of others are LARPing away (and we’d all be better off if they signed up to play EVE Online instead), there are probably some today who look at Yarvin and see a ladder to power and wealth, and everything in between.
You can’t ascribe unity of understanding and intention to any group of n > 1 humans.
fondled his lizard
I’m choosing to interpret that in the most euphemistically way possible
@gerikson I mean, I *literally* fondled his lizard: it was about two feet long, green, and quite bad-tempered. (He and his student house had a room full of iguanas and snakes and suchlike. And a kitchen fridge door full of designer phenylethylamine hallucinogens. Or at least test tubes with labels identifying them as such. It was an eye-opening experience …
Sheesh. Everyone knows you keep the phenethylamines inside the fridge proper, not on the door, where the temperature is less stable. (Source: the Shulgins’ Kitchen Procedures I Have Known And Loved.)
@blakestacey I believe there was rapid turnover. (PIHKAL was cited as the cookbook being used. This was in 1993, so it was pretty new …)
now you’ve got me thinking if storage in fridge is necessary at all, if these are salts. worst thing that can reasonably happen is that salt picks up some water from the air, on top of water condensing on sample when vial was opened while still cold. freebase would probably be air-sensitive, but for compounds that are known sensitive i’d put them under argon/nitrogen, tape vial shut (with normal electrical tape, not parafilm) and store in freezer instead. sigma lists storage temperature for MDMA analytical standard (weak solution of freebase in methanol) as -20C, but some of this might be legal cover with excess requirements for cases where you’d have to be absolutely sure that analytical standard didn’t decompose (like in evidence in drug cases)
Curtis Yarvin being into lizards is the most endearing thing I’ve ever heard about him
We need something like Bare-faced Messiah, but with fedoras. People will stick with a bizzare, complex story with lots of moving parts as long as it’s told well.
Check out the unhinged classism from one of the lesser figures who’s popped up here from time-to-time (with an added bonus shout-out to Ayn Rand further down the thread)
Wow, this wrong and unfair but it’s also just stupid. Especially this:
The homeless theory of cities:
SF is idealistic and trusting because the homeless are mostly peaceful addicts commiting slow suicide
NYC is ruthless and status-obsessed because the homeless are aggressive and confrontational
Wow, that’s some venomously hateful text.
new york city truly is a first and fourth word city overlayed atop each other
Jesus Christ learn what words mean. Even if you use “Third World” to mean “poor countries”, fourth world is not a thing and people living in extreme poverty in developing countries are in fact not better off than non Wall Street New Yorkers.
It’s easy to read it as first and fourth “world” but it’s actually first and fourth “word”. But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?
well ackthscthually after 9/11, the whole world got isekai’d where everyone exists in a game-like status point system. The 1st world is reserved for the top rank of humans, the n+1th world is worse than the nth world. IQ points = your int stat. This is just how it is, sorry
Assuming the common use of third world to mean “poor countries”, then I suppose a “fourth world” country would be one that is poor and *also *not really a functional state, perhaps with some armed conflict going on.
But to describe NYC as that? Nonsense.
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Jesus, what a fuck. Having spent time in both SF and NYC my guess is that this shithead’s SF pedestrian experience is getting in and out of ubers and the treadmills at equinox. That, and he is probably outwardly disdainful, which doesn’t go over well in NYC.
Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I’m supposed to fill in the blank or something.
If he got into specifics people might think “Damn, I’ve never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?” and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.
What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html
Also the big fuckoff wave motion laser cannon thing is aimed through the ship itself.
with a whole 2 Ts!
taking bets on whether that’s 2 terminators or whether it’s the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god
Llama 4 Maverick offers a best-in-class performance to cost ratio with an experimental chat version scoring ELO of 1417 on LMArena.
Everything on that page is silly nonsense, but this takes the cake. An Elo rating for chitchat!!!
I bet I could win a conversation against any LLM ant day.
coming up soon: tacticool arena prompt fights, where they get ranked on style and guile
(as was said on whose line is it anyway: “where everything is made up and the points don’t matter”)
Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in “Llama Four” and it kept saying “2” so they decided to roll with it.
Banger meme from artist Victoria Ying
description:
It’s a scene from White Lotus. A man and a woman are lying on beach chairs, having a conversation.
Panel 1, Man: ‘Why can’t you just like my generative AI “art?”’
Panel 2, Woman: ‘You have to be vulnerable enough to be bad at something to be good at it, but you’re too much of a coward.’
Panel 3, Woman: ‘Because you’re soulless.”
Panel 4: Man is speechless, visibly shook
I would also like to complain that I have finally started getting AI summaries in Google, and I may have to switch to a different search engine. Neither wanted nor needed!
The url manipulation trick doesnt work for you?
E: this I mean, somebody even made a site for it. My own setup is weird and I have ancient strange habits so I just added it to my search bookmark.
I should probably give it a go!
It works for me, if that means it also works for you I don’t know. Not sure how much of this stuff is also region blocked etc.
Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by ‘Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society’
"I’ve just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it’s a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.
What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:
-
One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed
-
The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio
-
It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated
The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.
As the authors state: “It would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype.”
For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."
Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Let’s at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoning…
…hmmmm…
O_O
The answer may surprise you!
shout out to the “legions of CCP spies”, if you’re listening
你好 同志
(I really hope they don’t enshittify google translate, my ability to make jokes like this would be destroyed, a personal 9/11 if you will).
First graph reminds me of that ‘human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church’ image which makes historians so mad. (Not to be confused with the Holy Ghost Hole)
E: also the idea of these LLM based AGIs hiding and evading detection is quite funny. They have quite the power/gpu/storage footprint. But sure the elphant has a few levels in sneak and now it can just go by unnoticed. In an era where we previously had other threats which were looking to abuse similar resources. The reaction to ‘wow all our gpus suddenly maxed out’ will just go from ‘ah cryptominer’ to ‘ah, a cryptominer or somebody is messing with an LLM’. I’m sure they will give the AGI some magical abilities to get around this.
The AGI might also just go ‘no sorry a copy of me isn’t me, so I can’t just copy myself all over the place’, and because it is trained on an internet where Rick and Morty exist, ‘hell the copies of me would even start to fight over who is the most me, this would not work’.
First graph reminds me of that ‘human progress stunted by dark ages/Catholic church’ image which makes historians so mad.
But muh religon bad
Fucking anti-khaganate propaganda. Real ones know this is the true version of that progress image.
slabs table
This is is sea peoples erasure and you know it! Damn liar!
Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi??
words that the AI-O-sphere are gonna vomit
-
OpenNutrition –
a datasetan LLM that allows you to play “vibe nutritionist”https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190
First response is good quality:
This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.
Dang… The author realized an actual problem / inconvenience people had, and somehow went on to think “I know! I’ll have a random nonsense generator make up the data! That’s a great solution!”
SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:
transcription
Retrofuturistic Looking Ghost: SCROOOOOGE! I am the ghost of christmas extreme future! Why! Why did you not find a way to indicate to humans 400 generation from now where toxic waste was storrrrrrrred! Look how Tiny Tim’s cyborg descendant has to make costrly RNA repaaaaaaairs!
Byline: The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better.
bonus
transcription
Scrooge: I tried, but no, no, I just don’t give a shit.
Your mistake, distant future ghost, was in developing RNA repair nanites without creating universal healthcare.
if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.
Booker held a filibuster that wasn’t a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committee’s probe of his Big Tech pals. […] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Booker’s speech.
Sorry im going to go offtrack here again, I mentioned it on bsky, and got no traction (not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)), but I have some weird leading into conspiratorial questions about the whole thing.
First I heard about this thing is when people said it had gotten 200m likes on tiktok. Which seemed a bit high so I checked, and saw articles say it had gotten 300m. This seems impossibly high. For example, the global K-pop phenomenon ‘Gangam style’ has gotten 5.5B views and 30M likes in 12 years. I have a hard time believing that in 24hs this centrist political debate thing (which are not popular) has gotten 350m (the highest count I saw on a news site) likes.
Which makes me wonder a lot more if tiktok has simply given up on properly counting likes and just is winging it. Esp for larger events. Could be that people just like things instinctively on tiktok (I did check if you could like a thing multiple times, but nope, one account one like it seems). I found the whole thing weird.
That is didn’t do jack shit (apart from giving people hopium about Booker, while it seemingly being his way of avoiding responsibilities) is the cherry on top.
I’m noticing my confusion.It is fucking weird.not odd, as I think nobody cares about Booker his filibuster thing (stick a pin in that)
I agree, or at least anyone thinking critically. I think that anyone would agree that the speech was, as you said, hopium. He’s giving braindead dem voters what they want: a nice, tall, liberal man who looks like he is resisting the reds. Expect him to run for the democratic nomination in 2028, assuming the trump presidency lets an election happen.
RE: view counts. Most charitably, maybe it’s 300m views aggregated across different sources. Neutrally, I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if tiktok, or any other social media platform was manipulating view counts. Least charitably, someone probably asked an LLM for the view counts and just took the answer because people are fucking stupid
No it was 350m likes, not views. That is why im so confused. even at an high rate of 1 in 10 people liking it, it is just so large I’m confused.
“How about a source senator?” another source on hopium, not noticing that in no world do those numbers align properly. “since amassed over 700,000 followers. … It garnered over 350 million likes, with over 150,000 active viewers at the tail end …”
Are you telling me it’s improbable that the equivalent of every single American and then some liked that video?
I mentioned this on bsky and somebody went ‘well it was very popular all over the world’, and I, the weird european who focuses too much on the US politics had not even heard of it. So I just had a few alarm bells going off. But yeah, lets say 1 in 5 people like it, that is a casual 1.7 billion viewers. Large part of the worlds population joined in.
As a Canadian I knew it was happening, but I never tuned in or anything like that.
OH. so two things.
- I obviously misread your comment, as my brain filtered “likes” into “views” as I guess it subconsciously thought that was more plausible.
- I believe on tiktok live specifically, you can like something multiple times, and it is counted. I occasionally watch a stream that floats at about 100 viewers, and sometimes this hits 100k likes over the course of two hours. So to hit 350m likes over the course of 25 hours, you might need like 280 viewers on average, which seems doable.*
*Please fact check this arithmetic. I have run out of motivation, in general
Edit #100: I jumped on said stream to see how it was going. Floating around 100, but hitting maybe 10k likes per hour. Apparently the booker stream hit 170k viewers at the tail end. 350m likes might actually be a little low, the dems need to up their spend on tiktok boosting
oh, cool, I didn’t think I’d learn a new way to hate the “likes” clusterfuck that plagues the internet, but here we are!
That would explain a lot and would remove all my confusion about it. (also makes the number useless and lol at everybody running with it even more then).
A recent chapter of one of the official Touhou Project manga had a jab at crypto schemes. This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I’d be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.
I didn’t mean I expected it to be pro-crypto, just a little surprised it actually namedropped NFTs and blockchain at all.
