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 Pride :3)
Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND
(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)
The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like
Calls Al coding assistants too risky
Has never tested Al-generated code
Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets
Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?
Perfection
Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed
Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the people who think it’s impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.
Engineering/Adoptive: Adds eval tests to flag hallucinations
Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.
Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI
I wonder where Edsger Dijkstra would fall in this table.
0,0 position, to the left of the makeupless guy above the engineering bit.
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with “sorry, we really aren’t equipped to help you”
stop it, get some help.pdf
AI audio transcription is great.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987
Sean Murray @NoMansSky
Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.
Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.
Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.
LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining
https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068
David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.
Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.
L. O. L.
This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there’s at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
I’m gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek’s screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.
Followup to this bit of news: ‘Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI “hybrid” movie’
Link to interview: (variety) (archive)
relevant section from interview:
As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.
“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.
When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.
“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”
“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”
She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”
I mean I don’t doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I’ve got a lot of love for Rian Johnson’s work and don’t have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it’s artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn’t stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don’t have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, but it’s still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it’s not just that AI art is bad - we’ve seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it’s replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don’t think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you’re paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn’t have created the torment nexus, you’re still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.
Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.
Not gonna lie, if Rian Johnson ends up being in that milieu I’ll be absolutely heartbroken.
I have to wonder whether Lyonne bought a pig in a poke, as it were. There has been, AFAICT, no actual investigative reporting about whatever the deal was for. Is it really just a new coat of paint slapped on the same kind of FX work that’s been done for decades? (“Set extensions” sounds like the Star Wars prequels, for glob’s sake.) Just how much here is A Guy Instead?
It would be darkly funny if the studio got reamed online for being anti-art sellouts, while also getting ripped off.
… That could be a good movie.
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
Tired: brain rot
Wired: brain soap
Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won’t join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
That’s a whole lotta words to say “I’m a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.”
he’s not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
fwiw, there’s a telling detail about ptaček’s attitude to people who he doesn’t see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when he’s not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.
it’s either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.
This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
I bet you’re right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it’s so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course he’s not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog
@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, it’s a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because it’s made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.
make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash
Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of
os.system,subprocess.runand/orsubprocess.callthat could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey
shellcheck.It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
Has anyone heard of Boom Supersonic? Supposedly the company is making a new SST that is supposed to be able to go supersonic without the sonic boom hitting the ground by flying at or above 50,000 feet. They did a demo flight using a a plane that doesn’t use the engine tech that the prospective finished plane will have nor does it resemble the prospective airframe design, so it seems like they went fast to prove fast plane is fast I guess?
I just now heard about here. Reading about it on Wikipedia… they had a mathematical model that said their design shouldn’t generate a sonic boom audible from ground level, but it was possible their mathematical model wasn’t completely correct, so building a 1/3 scale prototype (apparently) validated their model? It’s possible their model won’t be right about their prospective design, but if it was right about the 1/3 scale then that is good evidence their model will be right? idk,
I’m not seeing much that is sneerable here, it seems kind of neat. Surely they wouldn’t spend the money on the 1/3 scale prototype unless they actually needed the data (as opposed to it being a marketing ploy or worse yet a ploy for more VC funds)… surely they wouldn’t?iirc about the Concorde (one of only two supersonic passenger planes), it isn’t so much that supersonic passenger planes aren’t technologically viable, its more a question of economics (with some additional issues with noise pollution and other environmental issues). Limits on their flight path because of the sonic booms was one of the problems with the Concorde, so at least they won’t have that problem. And as to the other questions… Boom Supersonic’s webpage directly addresses these questions, but not in any detail, but at least they address them…
Looking for some more skeptical sources… this website seems interesting: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-boom-successfully-build-a-supersonic . They point out some big problems with Boom’s approach. Boom is designing both its own engine and it’s own plane, and the costs are likely to run into the limits of their VC funding even assuming nothing goes wrong. And even if they get a working plane and engine, the safety, cost, and reliability needed for a viable supersonic passenger plane might not be met. And… XB-1 didn’t actually reach Mach 2.2 and was retired after only a few flight. Maybe it was a desperate ploy for more VC funding? Or maybe it had some unannounced issues? Okay… I’m seeing why this is potentially sneerable. There is a decent chance they entirely fail to deliver a plane with the VC funding they have, and even if they get that far it is likely to fail as a commercially viable passenger plane. Still, there is some possibility they deliver something… so eh, wait and see?
Boom is designing both its own engine
Which is absolutely insane. The knowledge to make efficient, modern jet engines is heavily concentrated (for example, India has been trying to build their own jet engines to reduce dependency on the US and Russia and have only managed to get to 1970s-era technology) and I have no expectation for Boom to be able to match that by any means.
It doesn’t seem like a viable thing. Is there really enough demand for a supersonic commercial flight with the seating capacity of a regional? The company claims that major airlines have already committed to purchasing the yet-to-exist plane, which begs the question “how committed?” I would highly doubt that without a demonstrator specifically for the passenger version, that any airline would put down any amount of money. I have been known to underestimate the foolishness of leadership, so maybe there is an inked deal as opposed to a handshake for x number of planes, though only at y price.
In concept, supersonic aircraft are cool. Going fast is really neat. I think those are the feelings Boom is banking on, which is sad because I feel that their airliner is vaporware.
Yeah, the commitment might be only a token amount of money as a deposit or maybe even less than that. A sufficiently reliable and cost effective (which will include fuel costs and maintenance cost) supersonic passenger plane doesn’t seem impossible in principle? Maybe cryptocurrency, NFTs, LLMs, and other crap like Theranos have given me low standards on startups: at the very least, Boom is attempting to make something that is in principle possible (for within an OOM of their requested funding) and not useless or criminal in the case that it actually works and would solve a real (if niche) need. I wouldn’t be that surprised if they eventually produce a passenger plane… a decade from now, well over the originally planned budget target, that is too costly to fuel and maintain for all but the most niche clientele.
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Congrats!
Congrats! :D
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.
eugenics, saas edition
sigh
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
