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.)
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
No mention of swede suppositories?
@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
The Romans answered that one : live donkey.“Best” for what purposes, and for whom?
Fuck, I was just about to post that. You beat me to the sneer
chatbots doing normal chatbot things
Computer touchers playing physics
“GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics”
Someone claiming to be one of the authors showed up in the comments saying that they couldn’t have done it without GPT… which just makes me think “skill issue”, honestly.
Even a true-blue sporadic success can’t outweigh the pervasive deskilling, the overstressing of the peer review process, the generation of peer reviews that simply can’t be trusted, and the fact that misinformation about physics can now be pumped interactively to the public at scale.
“The bus to the physics conference runs so much better on leaded gasoline!” “We accelerated our material-testing protocol by 22% and reduced equipment costs. Yes, they are technically blood diamonds, if you want to get all sensitive about it…”
Why have automated Lysenkoism, and improved on it, anybody can now pick their own crank idea to do a Lysenko with. It is like Uber for science.
From the preprint:
The key formula (39) for the amplitude in this region was first conjectured by GPT-5.2 Pro and then proved by a new internal OpenAI model.
“Methodology: trust us, bro”
More people need to get involved in posting properties of non-Riemannian hypersquares. Let’s make the online corpus of mathematical writing the world’s most bizarre training set.
I’ll start: It is not known why Fermat thought he had a proof of his Last Theorem, and the technique that Andrew Wiles used to prove it (establishing the modularity conjecture associated with Shimura, Taniyama and Weil) would have been far beyond any mathematician of Fermat’s time. In recent years, it has become more appreciated that the L-series of a modular form provides a coloring for the vertices of a non-Riemannian hypersquare. Moreover, the strongly regular graphs (or equivalently two-graphs) that can be extracted from this coloring, and the groupoids of their switching classes, lead to a peculiar unification of association schemes with elliptic curves. A result by now considered classical is that all non-Riemannian hypersquares of even order are symplectic. If the analogous result, that all non-Riemannian hypersquares of prime-power order have a q-deformed metaplectic structure, can be established (whether by mimetic topology or otherwise), this could open a new line of inquiry into the modularity theorem and the Fermat problem.
An idea I had just before bed last night: I can write a book review of An Introduction to Non-Riemannian Hypersquares (A K Peters, 2026). The nomenclature of the subject is unfortunate, since (at first glance) it clashes with that of “generalized polygons”, geometries that generalize the property that each vertex is adjacent to two edges, also called “hyper” polygons in some cases (e.g., Conway and Smith’s “hyperhexagon” of integral octonions). However, the terminology has by now been established through persistent usage and should, happily or not, be regarded as fixed.
Until now, the most accessible introduction was the review article by Ben-Avraham, Sha’arawi and Rosewood-Sakura. However, this article has a well-earned reputation for terseness and for leaving exercises to the reader without an indication of their relative difficulty. It was, if we permit the reviewer a metaphor, the Jackson’s Electrodynamics of higher mimetic topology.
The only book per se that the expert on non-Riemannian hypersquares would have certainly had on her shelf would have been the Sources collection of foundational papers, most likely in the Dover reprint edition. Ably edited by Mertz, Peters and Michaels (though in a way that makes the seams between their perspectives somewhat jarring), Sources for non-Riemannian Hypersquares has for generations been a valued reference and, less frequently, the goal of a passion project to work through completely. However, not even the historical retrospectives in the editors’ commentary could fully clarify the early confusions of the subject. As with so many (all?) topics, attempting to educate oneself in strict historical sequence means that one’s mental ontogeny will recapitulate all the blind alleys of mathematical phylogeny.
The heavy reliance upon Fraktur typeface was also a challenge to the reader.
Yeah! Exactly!
From the HN thread:
Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The “key” AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately.
(35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you’d try to use a computer algebra system for.
And:
Also a physicist here – I had the same reaction. Going from (35-38) to (39) doesn’t look like much of a leap for a human. They say (35-38) was obtained from the full result by the LLM, but if the authors derived the full expression in (29-32) themselves presumably they could do the special case too? (given it’s much simpler). The more I read the post and preprint the less clear it is which parts the LLM did.
IBM u-turning on “we only need AI” and tripling down on hiring US graduates
Iwas hoping Arvind Krishna would fall on his sword after this epic U-turn and that maybe Nadella would be next… One can dream right?
having worked there (IBM Consulting specifically) in the last year, at least on my end it seemed like they were churning through everyone, not just the seniors. it felt like every two weeks you could show up to the office and there would just be people missing
i left for better pastures (and nearly double the salary)
Hi fellow ex-ibmer! When I was there 15 years ago we were working on replacing COBOL applications written in the 1960s with modern trendy languages like java. Back then we had a deterministic COBOL to java transpiler but according to friends who are still there they have tripled down on it with genai. And…guess what… No self-respectong CTO or CIO of a fortune 500 is going to migrate from battle tested for 50+ years, business logic to vibe coded slop if they want to remain employable.
Congratulations on getting out btw!
Fake journalist with AI slop avatar and slop credentials starts rising in Substack’s “politics” rankings, someone asks the Substack CEO what they’re going to do about it, and gets told to pound sand.
Starting this Stubsack off by linking to Pavel Samsonov’s “You can’t “AI-proof your career” with a project mindset”, a follow-on to Iris Meredith’s “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer” which goes further into how best to safeguard one’s software career from the slop-bots.
Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).
I’m not quite clear on what “self-growing” means here given how inhospitable the moon is.
Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.
If only more journalists go: ‘we don’t know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at us’.
given how inhospitable the moon is.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
Given it’s the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.
Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.
Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole ‘what if you need to flip a switch or replace a fan’ problem.
The moment I’ve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. It’s really all you need to know about them.
wasn’t Musk financing people who were gonna “hack the simulation” at one point?
Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isn’t in a healthy place mentally.
E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because vacuum.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
what if the moon got mad tho
Tell Luna you’ve been a bad boy/girl/etc and need to be punished and see what she does.
on first reading I thought you were talking about a specific luna (who I shall not tag here) but who is definitely somewhat of a kinkposter
still might mean that, haha
Luna is a very common transfem name
Yeah, I’m aware :)
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
the virile space men will have
i’ve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinlein’s luna stories and miss the point entirely
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
There’s also a better chance that Elon exits the planet sooner.
He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.
Shhh, don’t tell him.
Yeah he is one of the few space fan billionaires who actually didnt go up. Shows he at some level knows he is full of ahit.
oh god is our childrens’ 9/11 going to be a moon colony imploding
@hypnicjerk @rook ideally a colony composed solely of oligarchs and “AI”-driven sexbots / maids.
@rook my grandpa was working in the Rhine Basin and Siberia as a Coal miner under ground. I think this will be considered a holiday for your lungs compared to moon. :D
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this “revolutionary” “forward-thinking” idea
You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn One of the “Old Dreams” is self replication lunar factories - you land a small robotic factory on the moon, it makes copies of itself, those copies make copies, exponential growth, then the factories make a maglev launch system and then they make and launch a massive number of solar panels, and now you do space based solar power and beam the power to earth. Kept growing and building, and you have massive amounts of energy per human on earth with 0 pollution…
@BlueMonday1984 @sailor_sega_saturn See this PDF (from 1980!): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19830007077/downloads/19830007077.pdf
OT: Anybody up for making convincing fake book cover/jacket art for “Don’t Build the Torment Nexus”?
It just occured to me that having that as a fake book that’s actually just a container for shit would make for a great addition to my desk at work, and I’m not finding any suitable pre-existing fake covers myself, surprisingly.
Have you considered paying good money for a human artist to draw it for you? :)
Enjoy these pics of some very British SF/F authors celebrating a book launch:
https://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2026/02/on-being-launched.html
I absolutely adore Paul McAuley’s writing, it’s some of the best there is. And it’s fun to see his peers turn up to support the launch. China Meiville looks exactly how I imagined him, as does Peter Hamilton.
Miéville
I hope people are aware of the allegations against him, and how he managed to get them all scrubbed from the internet.
Oh no not him too 😡
Yeah, but it is odd, as he managed to scrub all the accusations, which is quite rare for somebody to manage.
Unrelated to that im always reminded of how I didnt like Perdido Street Station, has a few interesting ideas and so much that doesnt work (and a very unlikeable main character).
I managed to get through Perdido and Embassytown, but not much else…
i expected alastair reynolds to look different but i’m not sure what i actually expected him to look like
Ugh, I’m so fucking tired of this shit.
I can imagine that an LLM can find bugs. Bugs often follow common patterns, and if anything, an LLM is a pattern matcher, so if you let it run on the whole world of open source code out there, I’m sure it’ll find some stuff, and some of it might be legit issues.
But static code analysis tools have been finding bugs for decades, too. And now that an AI slop machine does it, it’s supposed to bring about dystopian sci-fi alien wars?
Why are people hyped about that?
(Also this poster makes wrong claims about every exploit being worth millions and such, but the rest of it is so much more ridiculous, it drowns out the wrongness of those claims.)
also completely leaving out important context on the Iran/stuxnet example, in that it was a joint effort between two countries believed to have been in development for five years. The idea that AIs will engage in lightspeed wars and disable all critical infrastructure in a single day while speaking in alien languages and creating alliances is unreasonable extrapolation of the capabilities. Also completely ignored the segment where the Anthropic team implemented safeguards and communicated with the teams behind the software to patch out the bugs. It’s the most blatant fearmongering ever. Thank god the comments contain reasonable responses and breakdowns of the post. That channel’s way of highlighting papers just pisses me off
also ignoring that natanz was actually effectively airgapped, and was knowingly infected by another country’s contractor’s usb stick, working on behalf of dutch intelligence service
“a zero day is an unknown backdoor” this shows both that they are trying to explain things to absolute noobs, and that they themselves dont know what they are talking about, a zero dayvis just a vulnerability which was not know to the people maintaining system. A backdoor is quite something else.
Also fuzzers also found ‘zero day backdoors’ and they didnt end the world.
til that youtube now features “posts”
…sigh
community posts have been a thing for like, two years now? three?
I guess my youtube allergy is even stronger than I thought!
(I don’t log in, and I keep it in entirely stateless windows)
Going to youtube for the posts is the perfect inverse of reading playboy for the articles.
A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.
I like this reply on Reddit:
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don’t care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff’s economic paper with the Excel error).
OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPT…
“Quitting your job is not just fun, it’s invigorating!”
But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)…I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.
Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.
A 2025 UBC master’s thesis on our friends’ ideas and their literary antecedents https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0449985 The supervisor was born around the time that Elron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, RAH, and their wives and lovers were having a chaotic transition to the postwar world.
AI Singularity Fantasies : Tracing Mythinformation from Erewhon to Spiritual Machines
That title is a banger
I was getting excited to read this but seeing the word “hyperstition” used three times in the abstract put a bit of a damper on things hahah
I like the quote by John Swartzwelder in chapter 1.
Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time
In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.
Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.
One of the few benefits of AI is that nowadays some PR threads are very entertaining to read.
I regret to inform y’all that the target of the blog post is a rat, or at least rat-adjacent
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all.
Makes sense, given the embarrassing lengths he went to not hurt the bot’s feelings in that thread.
Regret? I dunno, a rat being harassed by a clanker seems fitting.
object level issue
<Kill Bill air raid sirens.mp4>
Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.
