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.)
Today in Seems Legit News:
āAs a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,ā Sƶderstrƶm said. āAnd once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.ā
- why is engineer working before contracted time
- if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
- if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
- if āno engineer has written a line of code since Decemberā, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
- why is hypothetical engineer a āheā, Spotify
- do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
- in unrelated news, Annaās Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
- though I wonāt do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is āAIā āmusicā anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
When someone says they can do this, I try to say āok, well can you do it right now to show me?ā and so far the answer has always been deflection.
why does engineer have to commute in the first place
What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.
If the engineer does not commute they will be unable, or rather un-abelian
Oh for fuckās sake
excruciating
What they donāt tell you about opening the Lament Configuration is, after the pearl-headed nails and the sewing of wires to nerves, just how many puns are involved.
Itās a good day to read this announcement and then field a question by a pal why their Spotify playlist plays in reverse
Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.
I guess since more down-to-earth stories like āchatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for meā really arenāt happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 all of the above. Re point 1, see also the recent HBR article https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
Soulseek rules.
fuck this tweet and fuck yud
Even if youāve never heard of him before and know nothing else about himā¦ this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.
in follow-up posts he talks about how heās broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that āif it were a 1950ās government and congress Iād be more hopefulā
ā¦so instead of proposing a solution like āprotest against thisā or āvote people in power who actually are responsibleā he jumps to āyour daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholdersā
with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes
The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market isā¦ whatās the superlative of ālolzā?
Groan, you donāt need to finish high school to learn about false dichotomy.
Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.
Is this really Big Yudās account ? Different nick than previous screenshots.
Itās his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence āall the yud.ā From his twitter bio:
This is my serious low-volume account. Follow @allTheYud for the rest.
The other one is meant to be serious? And low volume??
Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you
load-bearing āfairlyā
Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).
Iām not quite clear on what āself-growingā means here given how inhospitable the moon is.
Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.
If only more journalists go: āwe donāt know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at usā.
given how inhospitable the moon is.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
what if the moon got mad tho
Tell Luna youāve been a bad boy/girl/etc and need to be punished and see what she does.
on first reading I thought you were talking about a specific luna (who I shall not tag here) but who is definitely somewhat of a kinkposter
still might mean that, haha
Luna is a very common transfem name
Yeah, Iām aware :)
Given itās the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.
Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.
Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole āwhat if you need to flip a switch or replace a fanā problem.
The moment Iāve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. Itās really all you need to know about them.
wasnāt Musk financing people who were gonna āhack the simulationā at one point?
Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isnāt in a healthy place mentally.
E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because vacuum.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that marsā¦ the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, thereās less waterā¦
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
Thereās also a better chance that Elon exits the planet sooner.
He hasnāt even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I donāt seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming heās healthy enough.
Yeah he is one of the few space fan billionaires who actually didnt go up. Shows he at some level knows he is full of ahit.
Shhh, donāt tell him.
@rook my grandpa was working in the Rhine Basin and Siberia as a Coal miner under ground. I think this will be considered a holiday for your lungs compared to moon. :D
oh god is our childrensā 9/11 going to be a moon colony imploding
@hypnicjerk @rook ideally a colony composed solely of oligarchs and āAIā-driven sexbots / maids.
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this ārevolutionaryā āforward-thinkingā idea
the virile space men will have
iāve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinleinās luna stories and miss the point entirely
You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the āOld Dreamsā is self replication lunar factories - you land a small robotic factory on the moon, it makes copies of itself, those copies make copies, exponential growth, then the factories make a maglev launch system and then they make and launch a massive number of solar panels, and now you do space based solar power and beam the power to earth. Kept growing and building, and you have massive amounts of energy per human on earth with 0 pollutionā¦
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn See this PDF (from 1980!): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007077/downloads/19830007077.pdf
hereās another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.
(the answer is ānot exactlyā, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)
The whole thingās worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:
Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think theyāre maximising their own personal benefit.
itās full of quotable bangers like this, and itās hard to choose the one to quote, right.
āAs AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body partsā
Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you
OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPTā¦
āQuitting your job is not just fun, itās invigorating!ā
But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)ā¦I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.
Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.
Rutger Bregman admits that heās not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, heās sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.
For those who havenāt heard of him, heās a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlsonās show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.
but I do know that whatās available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.
Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.
Itās telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, itās so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?
Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).
Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.
Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:
But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse
Soā¦ East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesnāt rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.
And if thereās a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isnāt that the Japanese?
Iām open to input on either side, I admit I donāt know too much about these issues.
Iām not convinced they know much about Japan either. The akiya banks are notoriously not updated regularly, and the sites which sell them to foreigners even less so. I couldnāt find that house in the bank but it appears to be now listed by an agent. Single storey, wooden, 50 years old, in a bit of a flood zone, not even a convenience store or supermarket within a mileās walk.
Itās true Japan has a lot of empty houses, estimates are around 10%. Japan also has a culture of somewhat continuously demolishing / rebuilding houses, which is understandable in an earthquake prone area. That house isnāt in the worst state for an akiya, but it clearly needs significant renovations, even before considering understandable earthquake anxiety and newer building standards (E g. steel frames) mean that houses like the one pictured arenāt exactly top choices to begin with.
Also, the inheritance tax is a progressive tax, including a tax free threshold. 55% is the top tier and you need to be talking about literally millions of USD assessed value before that kicks in. Real estate is valued at less than fair market price for inheritance and gift tax purposes too. Even the most conservative internet article commenters in Japan will condemn people for avoiding their inheritance tax obligations.
Also no, you wonāt find wolves anymore in Japan, just fucking bears. The last year has been the worst in a while for bear attacks on humans, so Iām not sure the hypothetical deer population explosion is going to be a real concern. The robot wolves are scarecrows and were designed to look like wolves in the hopes of scaring off the bears, according to the link in the post itself.
The whole thing reads like fiction with grains of āfactā scattered throughout which hopes to avoid scrutiny by being a subject matter too dry and niche to be called out on.
Great 5-character sneer dropped: āai;drā (source: https://bsky.app/profile/katemckean.bsky.social/post/3memb4hybpk2u)
A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.
I like this reply on Reddit:
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies donāt care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, Iāve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoffās economic paper with the Excel error).
Stumbled across a stray blogpost that piqued my interest: A programmerās loss of identity
Very kool web page, that rat got over there.
Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.
this article involving an incredibly eyebrow-raising take from one of the people at METR (the team behind the famous ātasks AI can do doubles every 7 monthsā graph) saying AI is eventually going to become more impactful than the invention of agriculture and more transformative than the emergence of the human species and also calls it an intelligent alien species. Immensely funny amongst the other people saying āplease stop treating AI like magicā
the Harari guy also seems to be into transhumanism if a skim of his wikipedia page is correct. The āthis is the first time in history that we have no idea what the world will look like in 10 yearsā thing is also an eyebrow-raiser. I could probably rattle off a couple examples (ie the two world wars)
I like this one from āA.I. policy researcherā Helen Toner.
I believe the narrative around A.I.ās negative environmental impacts has gotten way out of hand. Yes, on aggregate the industry uses quite a bit of energy and water, but thatās true of any large industry. The relevant question is how it compares to other industries, and how it compares to how much value weāre getting out of it.
Yes girl, good job. Now maybe try connecting these two thoughts!
And of course on that theme from Melanie āComputer scientistā Mitchell
On the bad side: A.I.-induced psychosis! On the good side, some people will get a lot out of using chatbots as therapists.
These people have definitely offloaded the cognitive load to chatbots.
Every time I hear about people using chatGPT as a therapist, I want to scream
@EponymousBosh @Amoeba_Girl So theyāve reinvented ELIZA, but poorly?
An ELIZA you can date. How is that poorly.
On an unrelated note, apparently chatgpt closed down a lot of models yday. Causing a lot of distress among the āI never heard of the ELIZA effect and I am dating a chatbotā community.
@Soyweiser Itās a dumb, less competent psychiatrist. ELIZA might have been simplistic, but it was at least based on an actual psychology theory.
I was joking in the first part. No need to convince me it sucks.
smoke GPUs every day
I really want to see a Harari takedown.
obligatory: if books could kill did an ep on his big book āsapiensā: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/18220972-sapiens
the aforementioned wikipedia page has got some criticisms of his works under the critical reception section
Had no idea he was a military history guy lol.
neither did I reading this article was my first exposure to him
EDIT:
Iām removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.
Itās quite embarrasing, I shouldāve been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims itās saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!
Thatās what you get from reposting someone who has āThe Finance Newsletterā in his fucking username, couldnāt have gone well for me.
original post
From https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3mek7wsqgkk26
Microsoft released a study showing the 40 jobs most at risk by AI:
Tag the most ridiculous entry, I am curious of your choices.
To me it has to be fucking historians. Arriving at new conclusions by looking at available evidence and/or finding obscure references that are not well known to the public ā CLASSIC THING LLMS ARE GOOD AT.
before you order the cavalry charge, fwiw this skeet misrepresents the actual study topic rather badly, as another bluesky commenter notes.
this doesnāt mean that the paper is any good or doesnāt deserve mockery (i donāt know, i didnāt read it yet, and iām not sure i have apparatus to make other than esthetic judgements), just that the conclusions the og skeet author attributes to the paper arenāt the paperās conclusions.
Thank you.
āthese ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industryā
CNC Tool Programmer is a good one and shows that Microsoft, a company that probably has paid for someone to run CNC tooling for prototyping AND supposedly makes software, didnāt do the bare minimum to understand complexeties involved by talking to that someone.
Yeah, you can make mistakes with programming this thing, itāll happily destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling as well as potentially maiming or killing anyone standing too close while the machine is actually physically crashing. It will friction-weld your nice, expensive carbide cutting tool with cooling channels to your work piece (even if they are dissimler metals) by taking too big of a cut because it does exactly as itās instructed.
someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how theyād tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
I do believe thatās literally how the automation dystopia began in Vonnegutās Player Piano.
Thatās not just smart, thatās capital-J Jenius.
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
I expected a willingness from HN users to backstab the working class, but I didnāt expect something this blatantly half-baked.
10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.
Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar
Donāt feel bad, itās gonna be harder and harder to avoid being duped in the future.
But unlike those that have fallen to hubris I am built different and should be immune to disinformation!
Yesss, and itās still worth playing today!
I remember this paper from last summer, the authors put up a followup right when school started that distances it from the AI replacement theory: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/
I work a lot with the underlying data set they used, ONET is really carefully designed but easy to misinterpret; and also I wanted to mention that it is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been DOGEād since then. Future research into jobs, AI or regular, will probably degrade as this continues.
@V0ldek Mathematicians.
Tell me you have no idea what mathematicians do by publishing an absolute mockery of mathematics purporting to explain that mathematicians are likely to be replaced by LLMs.
Passenger Attendants
Hosts and Hostesses
Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.
LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong
@V0ldek āFarm and Home Management Educatorsā
WTF
Historians definitely stood out to me, but also data scientists. The glorified grammar auto-complete that canāt do math is expected to do statistical analysis??
Most of the routine data analysis has already been āvendorizedā, AI wonāt make a difference. Why run an A/B test manually when you can drop Optimizely on to your page and let it run. I mean, /I/ know why I would, but I doubt a PM would.
@V0ldek @cstross I couldnāt even read the whole list after seeing āCNC Programmersā on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of āhereās a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that weāre using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination boxā makes Willyās Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope thereās video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
Can confirm. Inbetween me being a self-taught coder in my youth to getting a degree in Software Engineering I also took a detour and got a degree as a Mechanical Engineer.
That involved CAD/CAM and running the output on CNC machines. Which involved hitting the metal piece with the head too far down and metal being flung around at ludicrous speed.
Meanwhile, Iām lookin at the list and amazed by the number of ājobsā I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasnāt evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but thereās little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story canāt read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935āCanāt readā is the kind of insult we donāt need in this context.
@blakestacey Redundant?
Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Archivists are less at risk than historians? Quality thought went into this.
Also mathematicians - have they seen how LLMs āsolveā problems.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Models?! The very form that captures AI and large language?! Models?!
So AI LLMs are at risk of destroying themselves?
How poetic.
@V0ldek@awful.systems @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems I see how you might find historians ridiculous but have you consideredā¦ proofreaders?
@V0ldek Oh no, what will happen to the ::checks notes:: switchboard operation industry??
Switchboard operators?
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
Seems like Sales Representatives for Services could go wrong in an infinite loop of stuff companies donāt want, stuff companies canāt do, stuff nobody asked for, and probably crimes against humanity.better read the study yourself, here https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Lol at āhistoriansā
āHe who controls the past controls the future.ā much?
(This is the run-up to that: āWho controls the present controls the past.ā)
@V0ldek yeah, who needs historians anyway. nobody listens to them or watches their tiktok feed ā¦
but āhosts an hostessesā ā¦ what do they mean by this?
