Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.
A student put on some Internet radio station for background music at the end-of-semester barbecue, so I heard a Grammarly ad. In related news, I now long for the sweet embrace of a peat bog.
https://bsky.app/profile/tomdellaringa.bsky.social/post/3lr4djpa4zc2t
https://bsky.app/profile/dennisbhooper.bsky.social/post/3lr4lyaxmkc2b
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I’m not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It’s a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase “don’t be evil”, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
I’ve just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
image transcription
Zach Weinersmith skeeted: Movie idea:
Effective Altruism Star Wars, in which it’s OK to be a Sith as long as the majority of your earnings go through vetted charities.
Plod skeeted: And when the Death Star explodes it’s due to fraudulant accounting
tiedoton skeeted: Building endless swaths of droids that do nothing but continuously experience bliss to offset any suffering caused by the Empire.
Not sure if that would be done by the Empire or the Rebellion
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with “sorry, we really aren’t equipped to help you”
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn’t gotten the message, saying that the project has been “paused”. It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.
Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, “will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol”. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don’t want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
“Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle the”, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, “MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…”
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was “haha yeah, mathlab is hard”.
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but I have no other way than to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife
B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.
I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I’m sure, and then it won’t actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you’re using R or something, if you’re doing genetics on Excel at all you’re probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.
Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *they’d* use ChatGPT nowadays then you’d be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/
“Microsoft Excel…would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.”
mathrix laboratory
I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than löast year.
Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don’t usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his “entrepreneurial mindset”, though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways (“Just ask it!”), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 “penicillin-events” in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.
It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn’t touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn’t matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn’t leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
Tired: brain rot
Wired: brain soap
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
Today’s “Christ, what an asshole” award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th’OSU.
This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there’s at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
I’m gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek’s screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.
Has anyone heard of Boom Supersonic? Supposedly the company is making a new SST that is supposed to be able to go supersonic without the sonic boom hitting the ground by flying at or above 50,000 feet. They did a demo flight using a a plane that doesn’t use the engine tech that the prospective finished plane will have nor does it resemble the prospective airframe design, so it seems like they went fast to prove fast plane is fast I guess?
I just now heard about here. Reading about it on Wikipedia… they had a mathematical model that said their design shouldn’t generate a sonic boom audible from ground level, but it was possible their mathematical model wasn’t completely correct, so building a 1/3 scale prototype (apparently) validated their model? It’s possible their model won’t be right about their prospective design, but if it was right about the 1/3 scale then that is good evidence their model will be right? idk,
I’m not seeing much that is sneerable here, it seems kind of neat. Surely they wouldn’t spend the money on the 1/3 scale prototype unless they actually needed the data (as opposed to it being a marketing ploy or worse yet a ploy for more VC funds)… surely they wouldn’t?iirc about the Concorde (one of only two supersonic passenger planes), it isn’t so much that supersonic passenger planes aren’t technologically viable, its more a question of economics (with some additional issues with noise pollution and other environmental issues). Limits on their flight path because of the sonic booms was one of the problems with the Concorde, so at least they won’t have that problem. And as to the other questions… Boom Supersonic’s webpage directly addresses these questions, but not in any detail, but at least they address them…
Looking for some more skeptical sources… this website seems interesting: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-boom-successfully-build-a-supersonic . They point out some big problems with Boom’s approach. Boom is designing both its own engine and it’s own plane, and the costs are likely to run into the limits of their VC funding even assuming nothing goes wrong. And even if they get a working plane and engine, the safety, cost, and reliability needed for a viable supersonic passenger plane might not be met. And… XB-1 didn’t actually reach Mach 2.2 and was retired after only a few flight. Maybe it was a desperate ploy for more VC funding? Or maybe it had some unannounced issues? Okay… I’m seeing why this is potentially sneerable. There is a decent chance they entirely fail to deliver a plane with the VC funding they have, and even if they get that far it is likely to fail as a commercially viable passenger plane. Still, there is some possibility they deliver something… so eh, wait and see?
It doesn’t seem like a viable thing. Is there really enough demand for a supersonic commercial flight with the seating capacity of a regional? The company claims that major airlines have already committed to purchasing the yet-to-exist plane, which begs the question “how committed?” I would highly doubt that without a demonstrator specifically for the passenger version, that any airline would put down any amount of money. I have been known to underestimate the foolishness of leadership, so maybe there is an inked deal as opposed to a handshake for x number of planes, though only at y price.
In concept, supersonic aircraft are cool. Going fast is really neat. I think those are the feelings Boom is banking on, which is sad because I feel that their airliner is vaporware.
Yeah, the commitment might be only a token amount of money as a deposit or maybe even less than that. A sufficiently reliable and cost effective (which will include fuel costs and maintenance cost) supersonic passenger plane doesn’t seem impossible in principle? Maybe cryptocurrency, NFTs, LLMs, and other crap like Theranos have given me low standards on startups: at the very least, Boom is attempting to make something that is in principle possible (for within an OOM of their requested funding) and not useless or criminal in the case that it actually works and would solve a real (if niche) need. I wouldn’t be that surprised if they eventually produce a passenger plane… a decade from now, well over the originally planned budget target, that is too costly to fuel and maintain for all but the most niche clientele.
Boom is designing both its own engine
Which is absolutely insane. The knowledge to make efficient, modern jet engines is heavily concentrated (for example, India has been trying to build their own jet engines to reduce dependency on the US and Russia and have only managed to get to 1970s-era technology) and I have no expectation for Boom to be able to match that by any means.
