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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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 āSay the lineā with eyes filled with expectation and glee, next panel a sad downlooking Bart says āAI is the future and we all need to get on boardā, third panel everybody but Bart cheers.
The computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they canāt put up with all your shit any more.
arXivās 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 arXivās 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
weāve 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
An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.
Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet ā more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans ā and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipediaās entry, and itās totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)
āI didnāt verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be betterā
What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.
āI am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to meā
felt much more thorough and organized
You know what people say about judging a book by its cover an all that? Of course a lot of people will fall for the āit looks goodā trap. Which is one of the whole problems of genAI, that it creates cargo cult styled texts.
E: and came across a nice skeet describing the problem " To steal a Colbertism: these are truthiness machines."
So the tl;dr review of grokipedia is literally ābig if true.ā
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 gameās Codex (āStarships: Heat Managementā in the Secondary section, if youāre looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which havenāt had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobodyās bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh donāt worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter theyāll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
theyāll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun
I know youāre joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copperās great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:
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The sun isnāt hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copperās gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core
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Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copperās a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to ironās 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing
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The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)
So, this ideaās fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but thatās a question for another day.
donāt forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sunā¦
Indeed, people donāt seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere
also unless youāre dissipating much more heat out at lower temperature, it wonāt even work as a heatsink because otherwise it goes pretty directly against second law of thermodynamics
if iām looking at this right, for copper alpha capture is actually still exothermic (by 3.7MeV and 4.4MeV for 63Cu and 65Cu respectively). itās different from alpha process, because in alpha process whatever comes after calcium is two or more beta plus decays away from stable, that is thereās already too many protons and next alpha capture only makes it worse, and it all happens too fast for these decays to happen. itās equilibrium process anyway at that point, but barriers are so large it probably doesnāt matter
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All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple
The authorās previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.
Proponents say this represents a natural step in the evolution of moving heavy industry off the planetās surface and a solution for the ravenous energy needs of artificial intelligence. Critics say building data centers in space is technically very challenging and cite major hurdles, such as radiating away large amounts of heat and the cost of accessing space.
It is unclear who is right, but one thing is certain: Such facilities would need to be massive to support artificial intelligence.
Starcloudās fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.
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, Iām afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on Xālike DHH and Ladybird doāthe 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.
The follow-upās worth mentioning too:
Itās interesting theyāre citing specifically DHH and Ladybird as examples to follow, considering:
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
common KDE W
Think some of the KDE people are old school punkers so might not be a big shock.
after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing
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 theyād fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.
cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise theyāre going to āinvestā one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarchās company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises theyāre going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of ācomputeā from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of āgrowthā 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 doesnāt even fit my face anymore. they donāt make cartels like they used to
Thatās like connecting a baking oven to a fridge and then marveling at the power of all the heat exchange
AI was capitalism all along etc etc
Moar like power the butt.
Ugh. Hank Green just posted a 1-hour interview with Nate Soares about That Book. Iām halfway through on 2x speed and so far zero skepticism of That Bookās ridiculous premises. I know itās not his field but I still expected a bit more from Hank.
A YouTube comment says it better than I could:
Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.
I can understand being concerned about the problems with the technology that exist now, but hyper-fixating on an unfalsifiable existential threat is stupid as it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.
it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.
I am firmly on the side of itās possible to pay attention to more than one problem at a time, but the AI doomers are in fact actively downplaying stuff like climate change and even nuclear war, so them trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room is a legitimate problem.
Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.
That Yud is the Neil Breen of AI is the best thing ever written
about rationalismin a youtube comment.āI can read HTML but not CSSā āEliezer Yudkowsky, 2021 (and since apparently scrubbed from the Internet, to live only in the sneers of fond memory)
Itās giving japanese mennonite reactionary coding
there is now a video on SciShow about it too.
This perception of AI as a competent agent that is inching ever so closer to godhood is honestly gaining way too much traction for my tastes. Thereās a guy in the comments of Hankās first video, I checked his channel and he has a video āWe Are Not Ready for Superintelligenceā and it got whopping 8 million views! Thereās another channel I follow for sneers and their video on Scottās AI 2027 paper has 3.7 and million views and a video about AI āattempted murderā has 8.5 million. Damn.
I wonder when the market finally realises that AI is not actually smart and is not bringing any profits, and subsequently the bubble bursts, will it change this perception and in what direction? I would wager that crashing the US economy will give a big incentive to change it but will it be enough?
I could also see the response to the bubble bursting being something like āAt least the economy crashing delayed the murderous superintelligence.ā
Iām betting on a new version of the āstabbed in the backā myth. Fash love that one.
@o7___o7 @ShakingMyHead itās a cult: it can never fail, it can only *be* failed
āWe would have been immortal God-Kings if not for you meddling (woke) kids!ā
I wonder when the market finally realises that AI is not actually smart and is not bringing any profits, and subsequently the bubble bursts, will it change this perception and in what direction? I would wager that crashing the US economy will give a big incentive to change it but will it be enough?
Once the bubble bursts, I expect artificial intelligence as a concept will suffer a swift death, with the many harms and failures of this bubble (hallucinations, plagiarism, the slop-nami, etcetera) coming to be viewed as the ultimate proof that computers are incapable of humanlike intelligence (let alone Superintelligenceā¢). There will likely be a contingent of true believers even after the bubbleās burst, but the vast majority of people will respond to the question of āCan machines think?ā with a resounding ānoā.
AIās usefulness to fascists (for propaganda, accountability sinks, misinformation, etcetera) and the actions of CEOs and AI supporters involved in the bubble (defending open theft, mocking their victims, cultural vandalism, denigrating human work, etcetera) will also pound a good few nails into AIās coffin, by giving the public plenty of reason to treat any use of AI as a major red flag.
I made it 30 minutes into this video before closing it.
What I like about Hank is that he usually reacts to community feedback and is willing to change his mind when confronted with new perspectives, so my hope is that enough people will tell him that Yud and friends are cranks and heāll do an update.
I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and Iām not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.
(Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad āapologyā, a better apology, and the video taken down.)
Employee at āplagiarism companyā defending transition to āplagiarism + pushing sex content onto children companyā 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 didnāt we consider the fact that āautomating all labour would produce more revenueā?
I realize itās been poisoned since/by coiners, but god I hate that usage of ādemocratizeā
As usual the libertarians are saying ādemocratizeā when they mean ācommodifyā.
Just pretend that itās coming from a different root word āmocratizeā meaning the opposite of whatever the fuck crypto is doing
could I, like, not do that? would suit my needs better. kthx
thanks for asking.
Noof course
itās democratic if i couldnāt do it yesterday but i can do it today, even though itās not the same in any meaningful way
edit: in all seriousness, itās disgusting the way they are pretending there is some noble intention behind any of this.
yeah itās very much an intentional usage of poisoned language to construct a targeted outcome
but arrrrrrgh
What professional athlete is a) working for OpenAI and b) wants to turn Sora into the bottomless fountain of goon?
A horny one.
And just as importantly, free-sprinted
Oh God my brain is so used to turning typos into likely intended words that I missed āfree-sprintedā, which Iām going to guess in this context involves being athletic and horny and bottomless and possibly suffering from protein-powder-induced lead poisoning.
That might explain why copilot is a cum sprite
horny and bottomless
truly a hellish predicament
Lightly concealing his identity behind a generated anime avatar may be the wisest thing that kid ever did
The kid arguing for deepfake porn ofc sees no problem with Ghiblifying himself with his plagiarism machine. Total fucking douchebag status.
āHow dare you suggest that we pivoted to SlopTok and smut because of money if something that we totally cannot do right now is more lucrative?ā
Really, Colin?
I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as āthe floodā, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.
Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that theyāre cool with all this.
https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood
alt text
A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text āfinishing this fightā, ādestroy the floodā and a link to ājoin ice govā.
Unfortunately, the music director Marty O Donnell (iirc?) for og halo games is a bug trumper and ran for office. And he made absolute banger sound tracks too!
https://www.gamefile.news/p/halo-ice-developers-react
Dev team leads at least denouncing it as the disgusting shit it is.
Thatās depressingā¦ I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but Iād be hard pressed to do that with any other gameā¦ I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but canāt remember much else about their sound design.
Well, as far as I can tell, we still have Nile Rodgers.
if you enjoy older elder scrolls music, donāt ask too many questions about jeremy soule either.
Not so much āenjoyā as āremember at all, unlike most of the other games Iāve played in the last 10 years or soā, but I take your point.
at least the dude who writes most music for elder scrolls online seems to be decent enough.
bet they wouldnāt take kindly to Wolfenstein spamming in return
NB: a few cocktails in. Donāt really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.
Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so itās pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. Itās initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.
Bungie made Marathon before Halo and itās basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many āintegratedā species. Itās a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.
OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pforās leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and thereās an eldrich horror living in a star too.
Hey now, itās also a clearly copy and pasted plagiarism of James Cameronās Aliens!
I got more āthe thingā vibes, tbh.
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Master Chief, you mind telling me what you are doing on that ICE propaganda?
Performing the SPARTAN Programās original aim, sir.
hmmm, gotta name my future scifi franchiseās augmented monastic space marin-time infantry supersoldiers THEBANs
(yes homo)
Yeah silence is being complicit in this case.
Trump also posted an image of him in the masterchief suit. Without a helmet. Halo is not my thing but I think that is a thing which is not done, like with judge dredd, the helmet stays on.
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 todayās 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 situationās 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, itās also fascist!
I would adore an awful journal club tbh
Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/
Itās a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I wonāt copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:
- Grokipediaās article on Wikipedia uses the word āideologicalā or āideologicallyā 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in itās Wikipedia article).
- Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like ārapid-onset gender dysphoriaā or ābiological malesā. The last paragraph of the article āThe Wachowskisā is downright unhinged.
- The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.
Also certain articles have this at the bottom:
The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Decided to check the Grokipedia āarticleā on the Muskrat out of morbid curiosity.
I havenāt seen anything this fawning since that one YouTube video which called him, and I quote its title directly, āThe guy who is saving the worldā.
Interesting that for the musk article, it has the āsee editsā button disabled. ha
E:
I peeked under the hood, āsee editsā data is in page.fixedIssues on the api, ripe for scraping: https://grokipedia.com/api/page?slug=StarCraft_II&includeContent=false
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:
āWe will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex botā 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 microsoftās mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I donāt see him actually doing a whole lot about it.
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 āweā 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 āeveryone is beautiful, no-one is hornyā, with a side order of āall assistants should be female and sexyā, to my mind at least.
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 itās actually refreshing when a website at least displays āthis shit requires javascript lolā instead of just not working
the modern web sucks, letās all train ravens like asoiaf
To start this spooky Stubsack off, thereās signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:
Just a heads up I havenāt gotten a refund from my cancelled FW12 order. Framework seems to be having trouble figuring it out.
I donāt 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 Frameworkās public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. āGo fash, lose cashā proves itself again.
iām trying to sell mine now
but also i donāt have any other computers and probably canāt afford anything
time for me to learn to use a pencil
The market should be flooded with used business laptops that canāt be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro
oh fuck, i didnāt think of that! thank you for the idea š
lightly used thinkpads are the classic choice for this ā 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 theyāre 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 donāt get bamboozled into buying any of Lenovoās consumer laptops, since they tend to be a fair bit cheaper and donāt have the same compatibility guarantees, repairability, or ample spare parts availability.
For sale: lenovo thinkpad, lightly used
-Earnest Hempingway
my laptop is a budget model from 2016 and it runs xfce smoothly and happily lol. i code on it and watch streams and play slay the spire and all the usual stuff. idk how the stylus changes things but the required specs for doing quite a lot with linux are negligible
thank you for the suggestion, this is good stuff.
Was on the lookout about a year ago, didnāt find promising enough back than, granted only checked a few places. Granted, I did want an ok GPU.
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WTF I was doing all this in EMACS in 2008.
As highly requested
who the fuck requests this shit, these people, their customers, their products and dcs could be swallowed by earth tomorrow with only upsides for everyone else
lord, this is so cursed, especially the gambling (though you could say all vibe coding is gambling, ha)
wait this isnāt a joke this is a yc funded startup
Almost gave this a reflexive down vote. Even for YC, this startup is tremendously awful.
Thank you for sharing!
It also integrates Stake into your IDE, so you can ruin yourself financially whilst ruining the companyās codebase with AI garbage
this is not web scale, you need crypto trading to scale gambling losses
