Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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.)
There hasnāt been a new spoon design in centuries. Is spoon UX innovation dead?
E: Iām reliably informed that spoon hype is not dead!
There is this tremor stabilizing spoon for people suffering from parkinsons disease. I think that counts as spoon UX innovation.
that is one hardcore high tech spoon and really, really cool
OT: Iām adopting two rescue kittens, one is pretty much a go but its proving trickier to get a companion (hoping the current application works out today). Part of me feels guilty for doing this so fast after what happened, but I kinda need it to keep me from doing anything stupid.
Hey youāre doing the little feller a solid. o7 be kind to yourself eh!
We had to do the same when my wifeās ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.
Donāt feel bad, the faster you rescue the cat the better it is for them! Iām sure your cat wouldnāt mind you making two kitties happy with a forever-home :)
It was floated last year, and its happened today - Curl is euthanising its bug bounty program, and AI is nigh-certainly why.
Randomly stumbled upon one of the great ideas of our esteemed Silicon Valley startup founders, one that is apparently worth at least 8.7 million dollars: https://xcancel.com/ndrewpignanelli/status/1998082328715841925#m
Excited to announce weāve raised $8.7 Million in seed funding led by @usv with participation from [list a bunch of VC firms here]
@intelligenceco is building the infrastructure for the one-person billion-dollar company. You still canāt use AI to actually run a business. Current approaches involve lots of custom code, narrow job functions, and old fashioned deterministic workflows. Weāre going to change that.
Weāre turning Cofounder from an assistant into the first full-stack agent company platform. Teams will be able to run departments - product/engineering, sales/GTM, customer support, and ops - entirely with agents.
Then, in 2026 weāll be the first ones to demonstrate a software company entirely run by agents.
$8.7 million is quite impressive, yes, but I have an even better strategy for funding them. They can use their own product and become billionaires, and now they can easily come up with $8.7 million considering that is only 0.87% of their wealth. Are these guys hiring? I also have a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge that I need to tell them about!
Our branding - with the sunflowers, lush greenery, and people spending time with their friends - reflects our vision for the world. Thatās the world we want to build. A world where people actually work less and can spend time doing the things they love.
Weāre going to make it easy for anyone to start a company and build that life for themselves. The life they want to build, and spend every day dreaming about.
This just makes me angry at how disconnected from reality these people are. All this talk about giving people better lives (and lots of sunflowers), and yet it is an unquestionable axiom that the only way to live a good life is to become a billionaire startup founder. These people do not have any understanding or perspective other than their narrow culture that is currently enabling the rich and powerful to plunder this country.
It somewhat goes without saying that this is the natural outcome of Paul Graham and others emphasizing the creation of new startup companies over the utility and purpose of the products and tools that those companies make. An empty business for generating more empty businesses.
A factoryFactory
A FactoryFactoryProxy, no less
EDIT
I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), thatās all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.
(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)
Why did this happen to ME?
this is why i only self-host low risk crap and itās all behind my tailnet
half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself
As a fellow homelabber, I would immediately ask: Have you isolated any of your homelabās functionality and shared it with the community? No? Why not? Iāll give him a little credit, as he was one of the principal authors of Apacheās Parquet format and Arrow library; he does know how to write code. But what did he actually produce with the vibecoding tools? Well, first he made a TUI for some fintech services, imitating existing plain-text accounting tools and presumably scratching his itch. (Last time I went shopping for such a tool, I found ticker.) After that, whatās he built? Oh, he built a Claude integration, a Claude integration, and a Claude integration.
https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange
Cross posting from reddit but hereās TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff
This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I donāt really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoplesā lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.
A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:
A man who is considered a TPOT āelderā:
TPOT isnāt misogynist but itās made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. itās a male space with male norms.
this makes it barely tolerable for the few girlsā girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.
Iād never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, theyāre never going to grow up.
I donāt wish to belittle the authorās suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participantsā worth.
Iād never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, theyāre never going to grow up.
Honestly i feel like my role in many of my friendships is simply telling people that they donāt have to follow these prescriptions and are allowed to do things outside of them, and that following these prescriptions isnāt some magic pill that is going to fix their lives, and is more likely a poison. So yeah if you started ardently believing that, I would not be opposed.
These people are bitter and sad because they are trying to perform in hypermasculine roles that only exist as fiction in marketing and propaganda. Iām bitter and sad because:
- these people exist
- i have to acknowledge that part of their ignorance is sustained by capitalist pressure and isnāt their fault
- i also have to acknowledge that these people are ruining the world and still need to be destroyed because they never show signs that they can be rehabilitated
Setting the stage: I had become a social media personality on Clubhouse
Iām sorry.
What I remember is that the organizers said something like āIām sorry that happened to youā, and while speaking I was interrupted by someone talking about the plight that autistic men face while dating.
Vibecamp: Itās the Scott Aaronson comment section, but in person.
āUā for āyouā was when I became confident who āNinaā was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but canāt make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like āwhat is Hereticon?ā for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions āthe consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers ā¦ leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen.ā Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I donāt know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
he blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but canāt make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like āwhat is Hereticon?ā for granted and is still into crypto.
I missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.
That āHereticonā link looks broken; I think it should point to this RationalWiki page.
It looks like this site requites
https://orhttp;//to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prependsawful.systems/and treats it as an internal link
I think theres a EA presence at the all the big universities now. Theres a rationalist meet up in Manitoba but nothing here thank god.
I noticed Sonia during the initial media coverage but didnāt know what to make of her. Theres another person on twitter alleging abuse at Aellaās cnc parties, I can dig them up at lunch if you want.
not to make light of abuse but I do just want to entertain the alternate world where people are holding CNC (computer numerical control) parties. I imagine theyād have a lot of caliper talk but since it isnāt about skull measurement itās fine
That would be a much better world (btw ironworkers are great if you ever get to use one).
Manifesting a more ironworker forward 2026 bless ššš
Transcribing (the nested blockquote is a self-quote-tweet):
Some day Iāll be able to write about my experience with Aellaās organizing/friend group who used their community power to slander me, bully me and ruin my life simply bc I told the truth and patiently sought understanding:
Idk what youāre referring to but she/RMN team, when I brought up concern about my abuser, strung me along for months promising a conversation, then ultimately banned me, publicly slandered/victim blamed me, and continue to invite my abuser and his enablers to their events.
Note: after months being strung along w no clear answers/dialogue, one RMN organizer told me I was disinvited bc theyre ārisk averseā w who gets invited.
Risk averse aboutā¦ someone EXPERIENCING abuse/CVs/retaliation (not reporting it), but not about the ppl actually doing it.
I hope they understand how thatās just not how you should be risk averse with your eventsā¦ After experiencing the RMN team participation in the retaliation (again, all i did was talk about things that happened n correct lies), of course my disappointment & concern grew.
Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025
regwalled, here are quotes
President Trump has staked his administrationās success on Americaās ongoing artificial intelligence boom. More than $500 billion may be spent this year to dot the landscape with new data centers, power plants, and other grid equipment needed to sustain the explosively growing sector, according to Goldman Sachs.
Thereās just one problem: Many Americans seem to be turning against the buildout. Across the country, scores of communities ā including some of the same rural and exurban areas that have rebelled against new wind and solar farms ā are blocking proposed data centers from getting built or banning them outright.
At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand ā a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.
Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmapās review.
The surge reflects the publicās growing awareness ā and increasing skepticism ā of the large-scale fixed investment that must be kept up to power the AI economy. It also shows the challenge faced by utilities and grid planners as they try to forecast how the fast-growing sector will shape power demand.
via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:
In a bid to tamp down growing unrest in communities over tech giantsā expansion of power-hungry data centers, President Donald Trump said his administration would push Silicon Valley companies to ensure their massive computer farms do not drive up peopleās electricity bills, seizing on a promise Microsoft made public Tuesday to be a better neighbor.
The Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, pushing aside concerns within the MAGA movement and seeking to sweep away regulations that it says hamper innovation. But neighbors of the vast warehouses of computer chips that form the technologyās backbone ā many of them in areas otherwise supportive of the president ā have grown increasingly concerned about how the facilities sap power from the grid, guzzle water to stay cool and secure tax breaks from local governments. And Trump now appears to be recalibrating his approach.
is it because of pushback, or is it because money is running out
Inshallah
My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out whatās left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.
one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. iāll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought āthatās coolā and now my reaction is āgreat, gotta see if an llm was usedā
everything feels gloomy.
Iām gonna leave here my idea, that an essential aspect of why GenAI is bad is that it is designed to extrude media that fits common human communication channels. This makes it perfect to choke out human-to-human communication over those channels, preventing knowledge exchange and social connection.
I am reminded of Val Packettās lobsters comment I read the other day:
The āAIā companies are DDoSing reality itself.
They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be āthe information superhighwayā with slop, so their customers DDoS everyoneās attention. Also bosses get to āautomate awayā any jobs where the personās output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. Thatās the DDoS against everyoneās human rights and against life itself.
Simon Willison defends stealing a Python library using lying machines, answering āquestionsā he previously āaskedā in an attempt to downplay his actions.
āalpha slopā
Iāll be brutally honest about that question: I think that if āthey might train on my code / build a derived version with an LLMā is enough to drive you away from open source, your open source values are distinct enough from mine that Iām not ready to invest significantly in keeping you. Iāll put that effort into welcoming the newcomers instead.
No he wonāt.
Iāve found myself affected by this for open source dependencies too. The other day I wanted to parse a cron expression in some Go code. Usually Iād go looking for an existing library for cron expression parsingābut this time I hardly thought about that for a second before prompting one (complete with extensive tests) into existence instead.
He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.
That one was a deliberately provocative question, because for a new HTML5 parsing library that passes 9,200 tests you would need a very good reason to hire an expert team for two months (at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars) to write such a thing. And honestly, thanks to the existing conformance suites this kind of library is simple enough that you may find their results werenāt notably better than the one written by the coding agent.
He didnāt write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.
Willison is also subtly implying the claim that his judgment on the validity of this codebase and its massively tremendous test suite, after a few hours of admittedly distracted slop extrusion, is roughly equivalent to that expensive expert team working over multiple months. Given that the entire conceit of this article is him talking to himself, I will continue to hold my reservations.
So, Copilot for VSCode apparently got hit with an 8.8 CVE in November for, well, doing Copilot stuff. (RCE if you clone a strange repo and promptfondle it.)
Fixes were allegedly released on Nov 12th, but I canāt find anything in the Changelog on what those changes were, and how they would prevent Copilot from doing, well, Copilot stuff. (Although I may not be ITSec-savvy enough to know where such information would be found.)
@BlueMonday1984 Signal gives spinning out a spin: <https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/>
Skynetās backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: āMuskās AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth saysā.
The article doesnāt provide much more other than exactly what youād expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: āmake all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and componentā.
Me as a kid: āhow could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!ā
Me now: āOh. Yeah. That checks outā
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process and I think Iām starting to have visions of teddy k
thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process
ā¦I donāt want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah Iām going through it ngl
Found a solid sneer on the 'net today: https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/on-floss-and-training-llms/
i am continuously reminded of the fact that the only things the slop machine is demonstrably good at ā not just passable, but actively helpful and not routinely fucking up at ā is āgenerate getters and settersā
A feature that every IDE has been able to do for you for two decades now
OpenTofu scripts for a PostgreSQL server
statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged. Theyāve played us for fools
