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 so 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.)
Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter
It’s a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.
The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it’s also strategic malpractice. We’ve seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.
AI isn’t going away. The question isn’t whether to engage. It’s whether we’ll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others’ decisions.
Short of wikipedia shipping it’s own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it’s not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.
The “author” used Claude to write it. It’s warmed-over slop.
Looks like he added a notice / disclaimer at the top last night? The talk page has some quality sneers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-01-15/Special_report
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesn’t understand the release process and I think I’m starting to have visions of teddy k
thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesn’t understand the release process
…I don’t want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah I’m going through it ngl
i am continuously reminded of the fact that the only things the slop machine is demonstrably good at – not just passable, but actively helpful and not routinely fucking up at – is “generate getters and setters”
A feature that every IDE has been able to do for you for two decades now
OpenTofu scripts for a PostgreSQL server
statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged. They’ve played us for fools
Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisor’s lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn’t touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.
I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.
I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.
I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I won’t be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability is killing me. (In my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair — absolutely farcical.)
Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).
(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)
Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
It is computer science in the southern united states (though I am open to finishing my PhD in Europe, especially because cryptography is an area of interest). Sorry for not mentioning this in the original post.
a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won’t accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
Thank you, I think this is something I needed to hear (read).
Also, a potential advisor who refuses to work with a student who stood up for their rights is not an advisor worth working with.
“I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn’t touch me or explicitly threaten violence”
That sounds like assault which doesn’t require contact.
"In the terminology of law, an assault is the act of causing physical harm or unwanted physical contact to another person,…
…, assault is a criminal act in which a person intentionally causes fear of physical harm or offensive contact to another person"
This is a lot more common than you’d think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly can’t think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.
If you’re really sure about finishing your phd, it’s probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if they’re close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But there’s a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that there’s assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and I’ve heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.
https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange
Cross posting from reddit but here’s TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff
“U” for “you” was when I became confident who “Nina” was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can’t make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like “what is Hereticon?” for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions “the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers … leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen.” Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don’t know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
That “Hereticon” link looks broken; I think it should point to this RationalWiki page.
It looks like this site requites
https://orhttp;//to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prependsawful.systems/and treats it as an internal link
he blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can’t make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like “what is Hereticon?” for granted and is still into crypto.
I missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.
I think theres a EA presence at the all the big universities now. Theres a rationalist meet up in Manitoba but nothing here thank god.
I noticed Sonia during the initial media coverage but didn’t know what to make of her. Theres another person on twitter alleging abuse at Aella’s cnc parties, I can dig them up at lunch if you want.
Transcribing (the nested blockquote is a self-quote-tweet):
Some day I’ll be able to write about my experience with Aella’s organizing/friend group who used their community power to slander me, bully me and ruin my life simply bc I told the truth and patiently sought understanding:
Idk what you’re referring to but she/RMN team, when I brought up concern about my abuser, strung me along for months promising a conversation, then ultimately banned me, publicly slandered/victim blamed me, and continue to invite my abuser and his enablers to their events.
Note: after months being strung along w no clear answers/dialogue, one RMN organizer told me I was disinvited bc theyre “risk averse” w who gets invited.
Risk averse about… someone EXPERIENCING abuse/CVs/retaliation (not reporting it), but not about the ppl actually doing it.
I hope they understand how that’s just not how you should be risk averse with your events… After experiencing the RMN team participation in the retaliation (again, all i did was talk about things that happened n correct lies), of course my disappointment & concern grew.
not to make light of abuse but I do just want to entertain the alternate world where people are holding CNC (computer numerical control) parties. I imagine they’d have a lot of caliper talk but since it isn’t about skull measurement it’s fine
That would be a much better world (btw ironworkers are great if you ever get to use one).
Manifesting a more ironworker forward 2026 bless 🙏🙏🙏
This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don’t really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples’ lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.
A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:
A man who is considered a TPOT ‘elder’:
TPOT isn’t misogynist but it’s made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. it’s a male space with male norms.
this makes it barely tolerable for the few girls’ girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.
I’d never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they’re never going to grow up.
I don’t wish to belittle the author’s suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants’ worth.
I’d never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they’re never going to grow up.
Honestly i feel like my role in many of my friendships is simply telling people that they don’t have to follow these prescriptions and are allowed to do things outside of them, and that following these prescriptions isn’t some magic pill that is going to fix their lives, and is more likely a poison. So yeah if you started ardently believing that, I would not be opposed.
These people are bitter and sad because they are trying to perform in hypermasculine roles that only exist as fiction in marketing and propaganda. I’m bitter and sad because:
- these people exist
- i have to acknowledge that part of their ignorance is sustained by capitalist pressure and isn’t their fault
- i also have to acknowledge that these people are ruining the world and still need to be destroyed because they never show signs that they can be rehabilitated
Setting the stage: I had become a social media personality on Clubhouse
I’m sorry.
What I remember is that the organizers said something like ‘I’m sorry that happened to you’, and while speaking I was interrupted by someone talking about the plight that autistic men face while dating.
Vibecamp: It’s the Scott Aaronson comment section, but in person.
This article genuinely made me furious on this woman’s behalf. It isn’t like most scenes or spaces are great at handling sexual violence, but in most spaces people would not accuse you of trying to silence and hurt men by saying you were groped!
Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025
regwalled, here are quotes
President Trump has staked his administration’s success on America’s ongoing artificial intelligence boom. More than $500 billion may be spent this year to dot the landscape with new data centers, power plants, and other grid equipment needed to sustain the explosively growing sector, according to Goldman Sachs.
There’s just one problem: Many Americans seem to be turning against the buildout. Across the country, scores of communities — including some of the same rural and exurban areas that have rebelled against new wind and solar farms — are blocking proposed data centers from getting built or banning them outright.
At least 25 data center projects were canceled last year following local opposition in the United States, according to a review of press accounts, public records, and project announcements conducted by Heatmap Pro. Those canceled projects accounted for at least 4.7 gigawatts of electricity demand — a meaningful share of the overall data center capacity projected to come online in the coming years.
Those cancellations reflect a sharp increase over recent years, when local backlash rarely played a role in project cancellations, according to Heatmap’s review.
The surge reflects the public’s growing awareness — and increasing skepticism — of the large-scale fixed investment that must be kept up to power the AI economy. It also shows the challenge faced by utilities and grid planners as they try to forecast how the fast-growing sector will shape power demand.
via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:
In a bid to tamp down growing unrest in communities over tech giants’ expansion of power-hungry data centers, President Donald Trump said his administration would push Silicon Valley companies to ensure their massive computer farms do not drive up people’s electricity bills, seizing on a promise Microsoft made public Tuesday to be a better neighbor.
The Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, pushing aside concerns within the MAGA movement and seeking to sweep away regulations that it says hamper innovation. But neighbors of the vast warehouses of computer chips that form the technology’s backbone — many of them in areas otherwise supportive of the president — have grown increasingly concerned about how the facilities sap power from the grid, guzzle water to stay cool and secure tax breaks from local governments. And Trump now appears to be recalibrating his approach.
is it because of pushback, or is it because money is running out
Inshallah
My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out what’s left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.
@BlueMonday1984 Signal gives spinning out a spin: <https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/>
So, Copilot for VSCode apparently got hit with an 8.8 CVE in November for, well, doing Copilot stuff. (RCE if you clone a strange repo and promptfondle it.)
Fixes were allegedly released on Nov 12th, but I can’t find anything in the Changelog on what those changes were, and how they would prevent Copilot from doing, well, Copilot stuff. (Although I may not be ITSec-savvy enough to know where such information would be found.)
one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i’ll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought “that’s cool” and now my reaction is “great, gotta see if an llm was used”
everything feels gloomy.
I’m gonna leave here my idea, that an essential aspect of why GenAI is bad is that it is designed to extrude media that fits common human communication channels. This makes it perfect to choke out human-to-human communication over those channels, preventing knowledge exchange and social connection.
I am reminded of Val Packett’s lobsters comment I read the other day:
The “AI” companies are DDoSing reality itself.
They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be “the information superhighway” with slop, so their customers DDoS everyone’s attention. Also bosses get to “automate away” any jobs where the person’s output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. That’s the DDoS against everyone’s human rights and against life itself.
It’s like carbon monoxide binding to hemoglobin.
Found a solid sneer on the 'net today: https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/on-floss-and-training-llms/
Skynet’s backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: “Musk’s AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth says”.
The article doesn’t provide much more other than exactly what you’d expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: “make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component”.
Me as a kid: “how could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!”
Me now: “Oh. Yeah. That checks out”
EDIT
I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that’s all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.
As a fellow homelabber, I would immediately ask: Have you isolated any of your homelab’s functionality and shared it with the community? No? Why not? I’ll give him a little credit, as he was one of the principal authors of Apache’s Parquet format and Arrow library; he does know how to write code. But what did he actually produce with the vibecoding tools? Well, first he made a TUI for some fintech services, imitating existing plain-text accounting tools and presumably scratching his itch. (Last time I went shopping for such a tool, I found ticker.) After that, what’s he built? Oh, he built a Claude integration, a Claude integration, and a Claude integration.
(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)
Why did this happen to ME?
this is why i only self-host low risk crap and it’s all behind my tailnet
half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself
New post from Iris Meredith, doing a deep-dive into why tech culture was so vulnerable to being taken over by slop machines
OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.
<3
A fun little software exercise with no real world uses at all: https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/about.html
Turns out that if you stuff the right shaped bytes into png image tEXt chunks (which don’t get compressed), the base64 encoded form of that image has sections that look like human readable text.
What are the implications?
Nothing! This was just for fun after a discussion with a colleague whether it might be even possible to make base64 blobs look readable. There’s certainly no poorly coded systems out there which might be hooked up to read emails or webpages and interpret any text they see as information.
No siree I’m sure everyone is keeping the attachments and the content well and truly isolated from each other and this couldn’t possibly do anything other than be a fun proof of concept and excuse for me to play with wasm.
I’m apparently too
out of coffeedumb to properly get the joke. What’s the implications if some system parses the PNG text chunks in the same way it does the body of the email?think LLM agentic software.
It is insane that people saw that social engineering is the number one security issue and were like “but what if we automated that?”
Ah, makes sense. My mind was going more towards actual security exploits, but… yeah. Makes sense.
Anyways, thank you Flere-Imsaho, I will never not love seeing your username on here.
I mean, at the rate the chucklefucks are going, a number of these things are actual security exploits
that it happens/works for a completely unhinged reason is almost a separate evaluation dimension in scoring
a number of these things are actual security exploits
yes, sure, but in the sense of “social engineering the slopbot”, not “there’s a vulnerability in [x] which does not apply proper sanitation to non-body text content before evaluating it”
