Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)
EDIT, snippets:
- We cannot be satisfied with [ā¦] the so-called āalignmentā of AI [ā¦] without [ā¦] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. [ā¦]
- [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Churchās Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ānecessary sacrificesā may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. [ā¦]
When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone
for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien
tired: butletian jihad
wired: butlerian crusade
e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom
I donāt think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social mediaā¦)
Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldnāt be given healthcare). Itās hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:
Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here
ā¦ an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Popeās speech where he said that they will "work together to āfind the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.ā Chris Olah wasnāt a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.
what the fuckās the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?
Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!
āThe Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many peopleā and āitās really good that the leader of the worldās largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascismā are both true statements
Seizing āthe res novƦ of our timeā [derogatory] from this
In the latest episode of ābehold the power of Mythosā from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software
I distilled it so you donāt have to.
Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.
That 10,000 count didnāt even survive until paragraph 3.
Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.
Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates
Ok now weāre talking.
1,900 Reviewed by external security firms
Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?
1726 confirmed positive
You couldnāt even cherry pick the valid ones?
467 reported to maintainers
Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go betterā¦
1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)
1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers
Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropicās media release has the goods!
1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves
Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.
Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity
1587 is lower than the infographicās 1726 confirmed positivesā¦ But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?
On maintainersā request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. Weāve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.
Iām sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythosā own estimations. But wasnāt that 1129 the bulk of your reports?
We estimate that weāve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that weāre aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.
530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainersā¦
65 of those have been given public advisories
The infographic says 88.
Iād ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.
23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it youād probably hit the same level of accuracy.
All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases youād probably get better value for your buck.
Iāve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I havenāt gone to read up in depth but I wouldnāt be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)
Got a list of a couple of names Iām keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place
Vibenarok
Eschatoken
ooh, brava!
Perfection
Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.
it continues to be amazing to me that this is the āhigh impactā area theyāre going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still donāt buy this wholesale, thereās a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), but-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time
[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corpsā¦
I honestly canāt think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:
- something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
- something where copy paste is a viable strategy
- sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
- scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.
Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But theyāre not even coming close. Not even with access to āpartnerā black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.
And they know theyāre not succeeding, because they wouldnāt bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.
Luckily for them, the slop ānewsā blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.
So whatās the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because Iām gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didnāt check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of āmore or less right, we swearā
Itās almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian ā#1 cybersecurity newsā company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).
However, Anthropicās numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.
The dashboard timestamp claims itās showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. Iām guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.
Itās the kind of attention to detail Iāve come to expect from Anthropic.
back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if youāre an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, āoh but theyāre useful for some things, like making summariesā.
four years and billions of dollars and devastation to āimproveā them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that āAI summariesā are going well:
itās hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you donāt already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, itās signal-shaped noise). but Iāll try.
Long (click to expand)
Plot errors
Or, ādoes this thing even work?ā (the answer is no).
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A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, weāre waiting for it to this day, itās not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
-
The Queenās sons and Robertās brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and thatās debatable as heās a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robertās brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Nedās son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. Itās famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous Kingās Brothers And His Sons.
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Robertās young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
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The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen š
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The guardians of the realmās Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isnāt the people beyond the Wall but what theyāre running away fromāviz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.
Synopsis errors
These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.
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āGood and evil content for powerā: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
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āMenacing barbarians gather their forcesā: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk arenāt actually barbarians, or if they are theyāre still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: āMeanwhile, Ned Starkās bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is comingā¦ā
-
āSet in a glittering fantasy worldā: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and thereās plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesnāt distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. āA glittering fantasy worldā is like calling Dubai a āglittering urban cityā or North Korea a āglittering green farmscapeā and leaving it at that.
-
āDeftly realised magicā: The series does the āreturn of magicā trope so thereās little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not ārealisedāāitās left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you donāt know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If youāre looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, youāre reading the wrong type of fantasy.
Silly errors
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Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cerseiās name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
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George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
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enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegonās Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and thereās no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and thereās no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly āenrichingā for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.
what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody
Itās been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.
āCerisiā and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?
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In a surprising turn and with much hedging, George Hotz suggests that maybe LLMs are bad actually. hackernews says that heās holding it wrong.
Iām sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet thereās a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.
Yeaaaaaaaaaah pretty much
At this point Iām starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. [ā¦] āThese graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,ā he added, referring to AI.
They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying āprovocativeā anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove youāre the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.
may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular
Itās jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods
donāt kinkshame
donāt kinkshame
Back in my day California perverts said ādonāt scene in publicā
A detailed look at what kind of slop code is being added to rsync and how exactly slop codes does, allegedly, ātestsā. Somehow itās just what I expected and worse than I thought.
OK sysadmin question: how can I āpinā a last-known good version in apt?
https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration#Using_pinning
Beware that down the line you may run into dependency resolution issues (but hopefully the upstream situation is resolved by then)
Iāve not seen this shared here yet so I thought Iād share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/
Mike Masnick had a look at Twitterās financials in the SpaceX IPO. From $4.5 billion in ad revenue in 2021, twitter + Grok is down to $3 billion ad revenue a year (and losing $6 billion a year just on the CSAM-generating chatbot). His billionaire friends tossed in $2 billion or $250 million each into the kitty after a brief chat back in 2022.
I think Trash Future had a great statement when Richard Dawkins was going on about Claudia that applies to this, which was āyou donāt have put in the the newspaper that you hug your stuffed animals and tell them good night.ā
The rsync slop-code scandal (mentioned here earlier) has now blown up in rsyncās github issues tab. And of course on the orange site.
The āC is too hard for the AI so have the AI rewrite it in Rustā take is just so galaxy-brained.
I strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.
i have already seen ai enthusiasts make quite clear that they imagine the purpose of formal theorem verification is to act as a bolt on for llms
I want to believe thatās next-level trolling. Itās too funny to be true.
The manager of the store says:
āStop. You know nothing. You have baked 0 bread loaves by hand. No one has ever depended on your bread. You are a finger-wagging āthey put dog poo in my breadā type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of baking homemade bread from scratch at home without poo. You canāt ship bread, canāt adapt, canāt even realize that a bread shop is not the place for this kind of attitude.ādogshit bread is the future, so you better get over it.
deleted by creator
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
> OPās language seems as if it belongs to someone who trains their children that gender and sex are different and sincerely hopes his son will play with dolls
Says Mx. keysmash username, as if it was a bad thing š§
Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?
Imagine the disappointment the rats must have felt when watching āRaiders of the Lost Arkā and wondering why all their heroes are getting their faces melted off.
A lot of rationalists (again including Yudkowsky) endorse eugenics so thatās probably not a coincidence
Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.
Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of āgeneral intelligenceā which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.
itās just another fash-adjacent subculture
If you want to witness a bunch of emotionally stunted clanker fondlers totally missing the point, check out the comments on this orange site thread.
Related:
Paul Graham: āYouāre holding it the wrong way.ā
I was surprised in a good way see nearly every single comment call him out. Of course, some of those comments (maybe even the majority) are probably boosters mad that he is skipping the slop emails in his inbox. I guess Paul Graham found an angle of hypocrisy that both AI boosters and realists can unite in mocking. Quite an accomplishment.
If you ignore the AI images (not sure how much of an excuse āit was a jokeā is but whatever) an interesting take on AI shit from an economic perspective: https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory
our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because sheās the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/
Why doesnāt she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person heād love to donate some Thiel bucks to.
He probably hates trans people.
Does not seem uncommon under a subset of very privileged white gay men. So not shocked if Thiel does.
donāt give them ideas
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds Iāve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that Iām a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
by āculture warsā she means sheās a fucking nazi
This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.
hmm, looking at the text you link it says āyour past statements in Twitterā first. could it be they found out youāre a fucking nazi
also youāre shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.
Tunney has deleted the post already! But thereās a archive and another one
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
āThis has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.ā
I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldnāt have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares
I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckinā minutes.
she badly underestimates my capacities as a hater
Prometheus a technologist? No he was a social media user.
"prometheus: hot take,
the greek gods: no give that back"
https://modmad.tumblr.com/post/758625466711228416
Also you do care just not in the way she hopes.
i donāt think she should be allowed to say āthe ghetto.ā doesnāt matter whether itās problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesnāt get to
Iām pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (
musl) telling her to go away last week. Sheās finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which sheās done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because itās the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since thatās the best way to show that youāre serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newtonās televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I wonāt be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United Statesā escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since thatās the best way to show that youāre serious.
Thats a trap if I ever saw it.
Deleted, but the archive remembers
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because itās the last bastion of curiosity online.
<close tab>
Speaking of HN, hereās the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875
btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they donāt assume itās because sheās a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she canāt fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.
Thereās gold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no itās because she went fash, you credulous dork
Friedrich Nietzche has been a disaster for the human species.
I never heard of Justine Tunney before but she has a Wikipedia page.
by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.
damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvinās R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i donāt even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing
yikes
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
Masnick also has a story on how Musk got away with hiding just how many Twitter shares he owned when he bought the company https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/11/elon-musk-settles-sec-lawsuit-for-spare-change-proving-once-again-that-rules-are-for-other-people/
