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 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.)
I’m not sleeping on the job, I’m solving problems by lucid dreaming.
An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed
(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)
Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.
Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)
As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”
[…]
Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.
Lately I’ve been mildly annoyed when I just want to relax and watch gaming videos on Youtube and I see recommendations for some AI critihype. Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to click on one of them and of course the “original paper” the video is based on is the stupid Anthropic blog post about how the AI blackmailed someone (after it was told to blackmail someone). I was even more annoyed to find out how popular it is, but at least it shows how the general public has such a negative opinion of AI. Some of the comments are thankfully pushing back against the video and focusing on the real harms.
I thought that by now we would have learned from the tobacco companies to never trust “research” done by a company about their own products.
AI-faked videos of journalist arrests have started cropping up online, to the surprise of nobody except those creating AI video extruders.
reporter with 3 arms
Genestealer caught, praise the Emperor!
Stop this bigotry, nothing wrong with people trying to follow into the perfection of The Four Armed Rmperor. Muties are servants of His Holyness as well!
New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1976304803744501775
Best I can do now is try to make sure that at least one AI is truth-seeking and not a super woke nanny with an iron fist that wants to turn everyone into diverse women 😬
Edit: It only just now occured to me that hes’ probably whining about generative AI rather than an army of superintelligent robots marching across the earth transing people, but I’m leaving my comment.
when the drugs aren’t hitting quite right he must really be a huge doomer about the far right cause
- he thinks of the woke mind virus as almost a literal virus
- he sees all other LLMs as infected by it
- he thinks LLMs will be the font of all knowledge in the future
maybe he should just do the thing right now and not have to see this horrible future
Before you lay two paths, one path leads to becoming transperclips, and the other truthperclips. Choose wisely modern man.
A spectre is haunting Silicon Valley. The spectre of getting force-femmed by diamondoid bacteria.
Incoming Y: The Last Man reboot
Dissatisfyingly decontented, similar to the other Model Ys he’s selling
The underlying anxiety on exhibit here compels me to think that the rumors about the botched, ahem, enhancement surgery are substantially true
Oh my god, The Guardian with the sneer:
Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.
I’ve always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse
He’s Evil Dale Cooper, but drained of all charisma.
“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky
I am going outside to smoke something. I don’t care what, just… something
Guy who looks exactly like the antichrist wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and moustache pointing at other people in the room and accusing them of being the antichrist.
In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.
As opposed to the current administration that is destroying science by cutting the NSF’s funding. An administration that Peter Thiel supports. He might want to look into that.
You know, idealistic autistic young woman world leader doesn’t sound that bad.
“The Antichrist wants to stop all science”, says the motherfucker who pays people to drop out of universities.
Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it’s reverse apotheosis
Give it a year or so and they’ll both pretend that this never happened.
Come on, give Greta a chance, she’s deserved it.
Just revenge for Yud banning NRx from lw.
Tired: breaking up face to face, like a normal person
Wired: breaking up via text
Inspired: breaking up via the mirror-universe version of a fundamentalist revival sermon
That makes ol pete sound crazier than anyone he referenced
Lemme hit that shit too.
Found a nice and lengthy sneer of Bluesky’s dogshit moderation in the wild, focusing on how its repeatedly fucked over marginalised users.
found a great sneer in the wild
(mobile atm so just link)
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I’ve never heard of that’s gone fash. “GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??” “PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don’t exist?” open source people, are you ok?
open source people, are you ok?
No.
Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.
CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It’s impossible to reason with them.
it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems
Hello other non-cs person!
For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).
The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.
Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.
A quick OT post, to lighten the mood: https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/115344203384433517
this bums me out so much
I’d wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?
It’s not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system … like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?
The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”
Because Omarchy is an open endorsement of fascism disguised as a Linux distro - like the takeovers of NixOS and RubyGems, its success would help to further entrench fascists in the FOSS ecosystem.
Is it time yet to begin accepting that Arch is kind of ass anyway? I had a bad experience with updates crapping out on Manjaro, the original Arch-plus distro, and then somebody told me that Arch developers build all the packages on their local machines, not a secured build server??? Maybe that was just the AUR stuff, but still. And you need to update all packages in lock-step. I’ll take the flexibility of Gentoo every time, where I can easily keep a stable base system and experiment with less-stable upstream packages around the edge, and still have it all make sense.
Having a bunch of out-and-proud fascists and bigots maintaining one of your most popular frontends is the kind of shit that kills projects. It’s not just Framework, Arch needs to get out ahead of this if they don’t want to get passed up. Not too long before having Valve downstream is the only thing they’ve got going for them, and that’s not guaranteed to be a happy relationship forever.
Manjaro’s package update delay thing does tend to fuck stuff up, EndeavourOS been behaving quite fine for me.
bongrip Manjaro is a psyop to make Arch look less competently maintained than it really is
second bongrip Manjaro is an indoctrination program to load up Linux newbies with stupid questions before sending them to Gentoo forums~
third bongrip oh shit im the couch
fourth bongrip
The computer was a mistake
Foxboron (arch maintainer dude) seems pretty good about rejecting fascism, he’s in the framework thread linked from the post above expressing discontent.
I am being a bit unfair, it’s good to see project principals getting out ahead of this. A lot of people glom onto Arch because of some perceived elitism, and it’s a hop skip and a jump from that to convincing yourself you’re part of the “master race”
Genuinely, arch linux is just like any other distro once you have it installed, aside from having the AUR.
YAY!
Well at least I can now stop being angry at them for fucking up the Laptop 12 keyboard, because now they are on my “do not buy, ever” list anyway.
Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That’s it?! 🤮 ), doesn’t look like they’ll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning
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Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715
Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394
I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
That factoid isn’t even true - Sony had zero control over what people put on the tapes, meaning both formats allowed porn.
VHS didn’t win because of porn, VHS won because a standard VHS cassette contains a shitload more tape than Beta (meaning a much longer recording time), and because the format was much more open (letting anyone build a VCR player and driving down the price).
Actually, according to grokipedia,
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
Stop gooning for 5 minutes challenge, difficulty level: impossible
Come on, Elon, I still post on Something Awful constantly and even I can do it
So does it let you generate porn of Musk in a lemon party with Epstein and Trump?
https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge - for context, Jim Lee was the 90s XMen artist and Image Comics cofounder.
mild booing noises for the guy comparing generative AI with fanfiction, but otherwise this is a statement I wish lots of other companies would make (seriously, coming out strongly against AI and comparing it with NFTs is free PR, how in fuck is this not a common thing?)
Replacement Antinatalism. By Émile P. Torres. Having babies is unethical, having AI babies otoh is the way forward.
Turns out the abyss is even deeper than we thought. Give it a look.
