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 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.)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      25 days ago

      I’m slightly disappointed they didn’t take a page from David and use the only valid photo of Jensen Huang for the relevant page, but the fact that he was encouraging us to sign a literal deal with the devil more than made up for it.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      https://boomsupersonic.com/flyby/ai-needs-more-power-than-the-grid-can-deliver-supersonic-tech-can-fix-that

      okay, that’s the missing piece (? not the last): 1GW from GE, 1GW from proenergy, 1.2GW from this fuckass startup that nobody heard of, either missing 1.2GW of gas turbines or 1.2GW grid connection gets almost 4.5GW of power for crusoe

      also you don’t need supersonic jet engines for that, these will be actively worse in reality for stationary power generation. they do that because you can haul them in a truck

      Meanwhile China is adding power capacity at a wartime pace—coal, gas, nuclear, everything—while America struggles to get a single transmission line permitted.

      thank Jack Welch for deindustrialization then

      we built something no one else has built this century: a brand-new large engine core optimized for continuous, high‑temperature operation.

      Lockheed Martin: am i a joke to you? (also, lots of manufacturers for proper CCGT turbines do just that)

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        read: “our product development is a black hole of cost, and our big investors are breathing down our necks to grab this cash while it’s there”

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      This is such a pivot, from “you can soon fly between capitals in half the time” to “this screaming jet engine will soon be disturbing your sleep 24/7”

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        27 days ago

        It never had market. Wait 3h at airport just to get on a 3x, 5x more expensive flight so that instead of 5h you fly 3h - make it make sense. For people that don’t wait at airports anyway rental of demilitarised MIG-29s would make more sense

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          Honestly you could probably pitch that to the Musk/Thiel set pretty easily by playing up how masculine fighter pilots are and disconnecting but not removing the rear flight controls. Let them push buttons and feel cool.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            26 days ago

            If anyone can figure out how to get exmilitary F15 for joyrides it’s them. I guess Thiel would be fine without pretending as passenger, but Musk not, and learning this takes fuckton of effort, something he’s allergic to. Either one of them having supersonic chauffeur that has to go everywhere their jet does is exact kind of nonsense i’d expect in this timeline, and i don’t think that either is actually healthy enough to become a pilot in the first place

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      The comments are filled with people thinking they are smart by questioning what is human intelligence and how can we trust ourselves. The kool-aid is quite strong. I am no Stallman lover and have bumped into him more than once locally but I do think the fella who started much of common computing tools and was part of MIT AI lab for a bit may know a thing or two. Or maybe I have been eating my toe too much.

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        28 days ago

        The orange-site whippersnappers don’t realize how old artificial neurons are. In terms of theory, the Hebbian principle was documented in 1949 and the perceptron was proposed in 1943 in an article with the delightfully-dated name, “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity”. In 1957, the Mark I Perceptron was introduced; in modern parlance, it was a configurable image classifier with a single layer of hundreds-to-thousands of neurons and a square grid of dozens-to-hundreds of pixels. For comparison, MIT’s AI lab was founded in 1970. RMS would have read about artificial neurons as part of their classwork and research, although it wasn’t part of MIT’s AI programme.

        • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          26 days ago

          Is there even any young people we could plausibly call whippersnappers on orange site anymore, it feels like they’re all well into their 30s/40s at this point.

          I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

          But in fairness to actual whipper snappers, and to your point, the '56 Dartmouth Workshop forward privileged Symbolic AI over anything data driven up through the first AI winter (until roughly the 90s and the balance shifted) and really warped the disciplines understanding of its own influences and history - if 70s RMS was taught anything about Neural Nets, it’s relevance and importance would probably have been minimized in comparison to expert systems in lisp or whatever Minsky was up to.

          • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
            0·
            26 days ago

            @nfultz

            In college I took an AI class and it was just a lisp class. I was disappointed. Also the instructor often had white foam in the corners of his mouth, so I dropped it.

            • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              26 days ago

              My college used the green Russell Norvig text, which had (checking…) 12 pages on neutral nets out of 1000 pages. I liked the class well enough, but we used Java 1.3 and lisp would have been better.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    Apparently you can ask gpt-5.2 to make you a zip of /home/oai and it will just do it:

    https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1pmb5n0/i_dug_deeper_into_the_openai_file_dump_its_not/

    An important takeaway I think is that instead of Actually Indian it’s more like Actually a series rushed scriptjobs - they seem to be trying hard to not let the llm do technical work itself.

    Also, it seems their sandboxing amounts to filtering paths that star with /.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      24 days ago

      They (or the LLM that summarized their findings and may have hallucinated part of the post) say:

      It is a fascinating example of “Glue Code” engineering, but it debunks the idea that the LLM is natively “understanding” or manipulating files. It’s just pushing buttons on a very complex, very human-made machine.

      Literally nothing that they show here is bad software engineering. It sounds like they expected that the LLM’s internals would be 100% token-driven inference-oriented programming, or perhaps a mix of that and vibe code, and they are disappointed that it’s merely a standard Silicon Valley cloudy product.

      My analysis is that Bobby and Vicky should get raises; they aren’t paid enough for this bullshit.

      By the way, the post probably isn’t faked. Google-internal go/ URLs do leak out sometimes, usually in comments. Searching GitHub for that specific URL turns up one hit in a repository which claims to hold a partial dump of the OpenAI agents. Here is combined_apply_patch_cli.py. The agent includes a copy of ImageMagick; truly, ImageMagick is our ecosystem’s cockroach.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        OpenAi yearly payroll runs in the billions, so they probably aren’t hurting.

        That Almsost AGI is short for Actually Bob and Vicky seems like quite the embarrassment, however.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      What, that doesnt even make sense. I dont type what im thinking. (My only real usage of llms was trying to break them, so imagine the output of that. And you could then imagine what you think I was trying to attempt in messing with the system. But then you would do the work. Say you see mee send the same message twice. A logical conclusion would be that I tried to see if it gave different results if prompted the same way twice. However, it is more likely I just made a copy paste error and accidentally send the wrong text the second time. So the person reading the logs is doing a lot of work here). Ignoring all that he also didnt think of the next case: people using an llm to fake chatlogs to optimize being hired. Good way to hire a lot of North Koreans.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        26 days ago

        Nah he has brainrot. He deadnamed and misgendered Rebecca Heinemann in his eulogy of her. Transphobia seems to really make people worse at thinking.

        (Not a big shock considering how bad his answer was towards the ‘epic own’ of the person asking him if he would hire more women. (He said: “we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like.”, which sounds like a great own, but leaves one big question. Why aren’t you trying to educate more people in what you want then? What are you doing to fix that problem if it is such a big problem for you? (which then leads to, how will you ensure that this teaching system has women in it, etc)))

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          25 days ago

          Carmack is a Gen-X Texan mostly known for using hardmode C to code an FPS. He’s so drenched in nerd testostorone I’d be surprised if he wasn’t background radiation level non-woke. Not saying he shouldn’t be as a human being, just that it would be an uphill battle for him.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            25 days ago

            At least we have Romero. Hoe had an edgelord phase, but only when younger and realized he fucked up.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      26 days ago

      Sure John, let me know when you’ve got that set up. Something that retains my entire search/chat history, caches the responses as well, and pulls all that into the context window when it’s time to generate a job referral. Maybe you’ll be able to do something shotgunning together remaindered hardware this time next year? I’ll be waiting.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    Patrick Boyle on YouTube has a breakdown of the breakdown of the Microstrategy flywheel scheme. Decent financial analysis of this nonsense combined with some of the driest humor on the internet.

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    I got jumpscared by Gavin D. Howard today; apparently his version of bc appeared on my system somehow, and his name’s in the copyright notice. Who is Gavin anyway? Well, he used to have a blog post that straight-up admitted his fascism, but I can’t find it. I could only find, say, the following five articles, presented chronologically:

    Also, while he’s apparently not caused issues for NixOS maintainers yet, he’s written An Apology to the Gentoo Authors for not following their rules when it comes to that same bc package. So this might be worth removing for other reasons than the Christofascist authorship.

    BTW his code shows up because it’s in upstream BusyBox and I have a BusyBox on my system for emergency purposes. I suppose it’s time to look at whether there is a better BusyBox out there. Also, it looks like Denys Vlasenko has made over one hundred edits to this code to integrate it with BusyBox, fix correctness and safety bugs, and improve performance; Gavin only made the initial commit.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    regarding my take in previous stubsack, it does seem like crusoe intends to use these gas turbines as backup, and as of 31.07.2025 they had five turbines installed, who knows if connected, with obvious place for five more, with some pieces of them (smokestacks mostly) in place. it does make sense that as of october announcement, they had the first tranche of 10 installed or at least delivered. there’s no obvious prepared place where they intend to put next 19 of them, and that’s just stuff from GE, with more 21 coming from proenergy (maybe it’s for different site?). that said, it’s texas with famously reliable ercot, which means that on top using these for shortages, they might be paying market rates for electricity, which means that even with power available, they might turn turbines on when electricity gets ridiculously expensive. i’m sure that dispatchers will love some random fuckass telling them “hey, we’re disconnecting 250MW load in 15 minutes” when grid is already unstable due to being overloaded

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    29 days ago

    the fifth episode of odium symposium, “4chan: the french connection” is now up. the first roughly half of the episode is a dive into sartre’s theory of antisemitism. then we apply his theory to the style guide of a nazi news site and the life of its founder, andrew anglin

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    28 days ago

    OpenAI Declares ‘Code Red’ as Google Threatens AI Lead

    I just wanted to point out this tidbit:

    Altman said OpenAI would be pushing back work on other initiatives, such as advertising, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant called Pulse.

    Apparently a fortunate side effect of google supposedly closing the gap is that it’s a great opportunity to give up on agents without looking like complete clowns. And also make Pulse even more vapory.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      28 days ago

      Is Pulse the Jony Ive device thing? I had half a suspicion that will never come to market anyway.