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)
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
deleted by creator
Thank you.
I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.
Hell yeah!
Seems there’s a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I’ve been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.
new yorker profile on moldbug (archive)
(still reading)
They should have just had Isaac Chotiner interview him to destruction.
this is the one who pinged me to see if i could tell her about using Urbit a while back
I wish the author had asked more follow-up questions to push back on this psychotic little imp (…easier said than done…?). Still there’s plenty of anecdotes which make Yarvin look pathetic (or just pitiable at best)
(Yarvin told me that he’d encountered several gifted Zoomers who’d read him as preteens because his “high-I.Q. style” served as a “high-I.Q. magnet.”)
👁️
“In this house, we believe in science—race science,” he wrote last year.
I wish Moldy a very ‘May you and you alone experience the consequences of your beliefs’
Thiel has always had a prophetic touch
…really?
I mean he accurately predicted the kind of dystopian shit Peter Thiel would do with a morally indefensible amount of money, so that’s something.
It brings moi le grand ennui to peruse the excessively florid and terminally gallicistic language of this higly self-esteemed publication elevating the persōna of urbane wordliness M. /jaʁvɛ̃/ is purposefully cultivating. The fustian pomp the reader is treated to gives off an air of arrogance-born naïveté—much as if the erudite hack composing the presented profile of our very good friend were oblivious to the genteel PR she’s lending the man of the hour.
For real though, it’s yet another example of liberal old media platforming a repugnant fascist bozo by playing along with their intellectual academic act, fully falling for the “evil Albert Camus” charade. These profile pieces mistake a subtle undertone of contempt for actually effective interrogation or criticism of the subject’s philosophy. Moldbug’s ideas barely have the philosophical depth of a villain from a young adult novel. The criticism of the slimy fascist’s neofeudal fantasies and his supporters’ implementation of them amounts to no more than a literary raising of eyebrows. In the name of respectable bipartisan stiff-upper-lip propriety it’s beyond the pale to call Curtis Yarvin’s ideology the puerile parody of high school libertarianism it is. A veneer of eloquence for chuds to point at and say “behold, not all nazis are stupid: this guy knows words!”
Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.
Curtis Yarvin is just an internet age Julius Evola for the type of people who are somehow also impressed by Julius Evola.
Quality sneer!
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
Today’s “Christ, what an asshole” award goes to Ravi V. Bellamkonda, executive vice president and provost at th’OSU.
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.
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.
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
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.
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
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
Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:
https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz
(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)
OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.
OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.
Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.
First we mine, then we craft hey does anyoune else smell burnt toast?
lol jfc
Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.
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
Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.
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.
