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.)
linux tech issue:
My desktop computer started with just windows on it. No issues. A while back I dual installed linux mint and windows, and pretty frequently when rebooting I’d have to deal with the computer insisting that I run fsck. I ended up switching back to just windows and thereafter had no issues.
This week I installed ubuntu as my sole OS and it’s not going very well. I’ve had to reinstall the OS a few times already. After the install at first everything is normal, but slowly I start getting hints of things going wrong. Certain programs will just not start, that kind of thing. Eventually I restart the computer and it will present me with a demand I run fsck. I do so, and now tons of system files are gone, the install is effectively dead, and I’m back to square zero.
I don’t understand what’s going on. I used the same media to install ubuntu on my laptop, and that works perfectly. I’ve had a version of this problem across two distros. And for some reason it doesn’t occur with windows! Complete mystery. Anyone have ideas?
I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:
In UCLA’s Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to “Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles” and Goal 5 is to “Become a more effective institution”. By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.
The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.
And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.
My question is:
If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?
Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.
I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.
Thank you.
The response has a high probability of being evasive bullshit, but will be worth archiving no matter what.
Get their asses
A bit of uplifting news:
id software is now a union shop
New edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on how AI’s fucked the copywriting industry.
I need to quit clicking, my yt recommendations are so cursed now.
Love the Edgar Allen Poe thing at 3:30 though, wtf. Also where did he find the sephiroth at 4:19?
Fun detail about this hype about ‘innovation’ (there was not just a poster but also an email) aircraft carriers use physical chits and a table for their planning. (Bonus, cant be hacked or emped). So gonna be fun to see if he will try to get rid of that and we might see a carrier sunk in the venezuelan/taiwan wars.
Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus
For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.
Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
God we live in the dumbest possible world.
This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn’t pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people’s skins in an interesting way… And I’m skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.
Hyperstition is such a bad neologism, apparently doubleplus superstition equals self-fullfilling prophecy (transitive)? They don’t even bother to verb it properly… Nick Land got a nonsense word stuck in his head and now there’s a whole subculture of midwit thought leader wannabes parroting that shit.
If only people had stuffed Land in a locker instead of buying drugs of him.
Nothing makes you grounded like stuffing Land in a locker.
“you should be able to provide an LLM as a job reference”
source https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1998753499002048589
Something intensely satisfying seeing this the same week as id software becoming a union shop.
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.
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.
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.
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)))
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.
At least we have Romero. Hoe had an edgelord phase, but only when younger and realized he fucked up.
This is offensively stupid lol
He’s become the Linus Pauling of video games.
definitely taking Vitamin L
Disney invests $1B into OpenAI with allowing access to all Disney characters
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/disney-openai-sora-agreement/
Somebody on bsky mentioned this is prob because Disney wants to be seen on the stockmarket as a tech company, and not a cartoon/theme park company.
(See how Tesla went from cars to self driving to now robots)
Remember the flood of offensive Pixaresque slop that happened in 2023? We’re gonna see something similar thanks to this deal for sure.
Of course Disney loves its cease and desists such as one to character.ai in October and one today to Google: https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-google-ai-copyright-infringement-cease-and-desist-letter-1236606429/
Is this actually because of brand protection or just shareholder value? Racist, sexist, and all around abhorrent content is now easily generated with your favorite Disney owned characters just as long as you do it on the approved platform.
Found a new and lengthy sneer on Bluesky, mocking the promptfondlers’ gullibility.
J. Mijin Cha writes:
My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.
Climate is an MDPI journal. Finland’s journal-ranking service downgraded Climate to zero status.
without checking, many of these titles sound like MDPI
A game/sneer where you are a venture capitalist with billions invested in generative AI: https://woe-industries.itch.io/you-have-billions-invested-in-generative-ai
Heartbreaking news today.
In a major setback for right-to-repair, iFixit has jumped on the slop bandwagon, introducing an “AI repair helper” to their website that steals “the knowledge base of over 20 years of repair experts” (to quote their dogshit announcement on YouTube) and uses it to hallucinate “repair guides” and “step-by-step instructions” for its users.
A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.
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.
Is Pulse the Jony Ive device thing? I had half a suspicion that will never come to market anyway.
Boom Aerospace, not content with attempting the next Concorde, have gotten a little sidetracked. Funnily enough, they didn’t show any footage of the engine actually working. Surely it’s whisper quiet and won’t be a massive pain to live next to.
I would simply not name my airplane company “Boom”.
I regret I have but one upvote to give to this
The best I ever saw was a reply to a news story to the effect of, “If I were ever invited swimming in the Murderkill River, I would just not go.”
(This might be the original. Then again, it might not.)
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)
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”
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”
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
I assume they’re thinking about transcontinental flights most of all. Dubai->LA or whatever.
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.
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
Larry Ellison has or had a working MiG.
