Want to wade into the spooky 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.
The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers
The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game’s Codex (“Starships: Heat Management” in the Secondary section, if you’re looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven’t had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody’s bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh don’t worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple
they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun
I know you’re joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copper’s great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:
-
The sun isn’t hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copper’s gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core
-
Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copper’s a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to iron’s 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing
-
The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)
So, this idea’s fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but that’s a question for another day.
don’t forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sun…
just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere
Indeed, people don’t seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
-
The author’s previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.
Proponents say this represents a natural step in the evolution of moving heavy industry off the planet’s surface and a solution for the ravenous energy needs of artificial intelligence. Critics say building data centers in space is technically very challenging and cite major hurdles, such as radiating away large amounts of heat and the cost of accessing space.
It is unclear who is right, but one thing is certain: Such facilities would need to be massive to support artificial intelligence.
Starcloud’s fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.
It is sunday, so time to make some posts almost nobody will see. I generated a thing:
Image description
3 screenshots from a The Simpsons episode. Bart is sitting in his class and the whole class in the first panel says “Say the line” with eyes filled with expectation and glee, next panel a sad downlooking Bart says “AI is the future and we all need to get on board”, third panel everybody but Bart cheers.
back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.
cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to
I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, “a total fucking douchebag.”
It’s true, the french are no fans of computer glasses.
“who some describe as a pioneer in wearable computing, and others describe as an intolerable douche”
lord, this is so cursed, especially the gambling (though you could say all vibe coding is gambling, ha)
WTF I was doing all this in EMACS in 2008.
It also integrates Stake into your IDE, so you can ruin yourself financially whilst ruining the company’s codebase with AI garbage
this is not web scale, you need crypto trading to scale gambling losses
wait this isn’t a joke this is a yc funded startup
Almost gave this a reflexive down vote. Even for YC, this startup is tremendously awful.
Thank you for sharing!
As highly requested
who the fuck requests this shit, these people, their customers, their products and dcs could be swallowed by earth tomorrow with only upsides for everyone else
long hand of casey newton (by proxy) outputs a weird hit piece on ed zitron in wired https://archive.is/chsCw so far bluesky in shambles with no other effects
i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.
on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he’ll work with a company like DoNotPay. it might be hackwork to suggest he’s concealing it, but I don’t like it, whether he’s open about it or not.
on the… third hand? when i’ve read his posts, i’ve found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he’s an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn’t interested in trying to make that article happen
I think Zitron has posted that none of these companies is profitable. Midjourney claims to be making a profit since 2024 although that depends on not paying for the IP they use etc. etc. etc. (and private companies can claim all kinds of things about their balance sheets without the CEO going to jail if they are creative).
his conclusions are a lot more complex than that none of these companies is profitable
none
When faced with a long complicated argument outside your competence, its a really useful heuristic to spot-check a few sections and assume that if they are wrong the whole structure is flawed. And at least as many readers will take away the soundbites like “none of these companies is profitable” and “pathetic revenues” as any nuanced version that is hidden in there. At critics of spicy autocomplete go he is really far on the “pundit” end of the “academic to pundit” scale (well past our David Gerard).
i see. i misunderstood your previous post, thought you meant that “none of these companies is profitable” is essentially his only conclusion and that you considered it justifiable enough
I think Zitron has some important analysis mixed up with the clickbait and the populist rhetoric. I thought he was trying to be a full-time blogger but now I see he runs a one-person PR business (!)
i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart.
For comparison I’ve only read Ed’s articles, not listened to his podcasts, and I was unaware of his PR business. This doesn’t make me think his criticisms are wrong, but it does make me concerned he’s overlooked critiquing and analyzing some aspects of the GenAI industry because of these connections to those aspects.
looks pretty good to me, I’d be delighted to produce this sort of work and he’s doing loadbearing work on the numbers here - that the finance press is faintly catching up to a year later.
Its too bad that Patrick McKenzie sided with the promptfondlers because he was a useful ally calling “we need more reporting on cryptocurrency by journalists who can read a balance sheet and do arithmetic”
He, or someone, should work with Bethany McLean on checking Zitron’s work. She cowrote The Smartest Guys In The Room about Enron in 2003 and a book about the 2008 financial crisis. In 2001 she wrote about thinking something was hinky about Enron’s financial filings.
Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.
(And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).
Baldur Bjarnason’s (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.
(In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could’ve nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)
Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.
I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron
TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.
In my day people were ashamed of being mad in the newspaper.
wint @dril 29 Dec 2014 and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.
Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”
Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.
Apparently someone has managed to wrangle a bunch of preprogrammed biases out of grok. There’s nothing unexpected here, and the source isn’t great, but might be worth a look.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/10/31/grok-admits-its-constructed-to-protect-israel/
Seems like fairly generic us right-wing thought, glazed with the requirement to hype elon.
I would not put much stock in ‘we asked the llm and got its prompt directly’ sort of research. Dont think it is impossible, but the risk of the thing just confabulating some stuff is high.
But lets hope this tricks Musk into releasing his prompts again. (Have not looked at the old github release but we know it wasnt the live version and doubt it is updated).
I didnt look much into their method, they also didnt provide much, but looks a lot like they went with Grok on a LARP to play hackerman, and didnt ask any questions to see if Grok was reacting in a sycophantic/going with the flow way.
ChatGPT’s data stealing scheme disguised as a browser can be prompt injected. In other news, water is wet.
i wonder if someone pointed that thing at tarpit already
The computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they can’t put up with all your shit any more.
arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.
from the folks who brought you
we’ve trained a model to regurgitate 19th century pseudoscience
the field of computer science presents: How to destroy a public good by skipping all the required reading in your liberal arts courses
any of y’all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it
Dr. Stone new season dropped recently, Golden Kamuy new season ETA early next year
She Rides Shotgun - basically Lone Wolf and Cub + Breaking Bad combo. I loved the novel back when it came out, the film is reasonably faithful to it.
The first couple Eko Eko Azarak movies. Grade-A B-horror Japanese schlock, main character is a Satanist witch teenage detective, more or less. Her goddamn name is Kuroi Misa (“Black Mass”), I love her so much. Perfect if you like brainless gore and non-irony-poisoned creepy movies for spooky week.
The movies are currently on Youtube in full. I’m also watching the 1997 TV series but after episode #3 you’ll need to speak Japanese. The movies are better than the series anyway (the first two at least, haven’t watched the others.)
Watched Once Upon A Time in Space recently - pretty damn good documentary series.
I’ve been meaning to catch Adam Curtis’s latest but I just haven’t got around to it yet.
Trying to think of what ai’ve seen new lately instead of rewatched and drawing a blank. Edge of Darkness (the brit one) was quite good.
rewatched all of DS9 over a while, its writing hits even harder in the current year
(apple shows but that can be worked around:) invasion, slow horses, shrinking
haven’t been watching a lot of series tho so limited bucket recommendation
The real housewives of Salt Lake City. I am not joking.
Oreo has shoved 40 million in wads of cash between two sloppy biscuits. You see, if they don’t do it, then Hydrox is gonna partner with DeepSeek. This is just business, it’s not a bubble
Oreo: the cookie that doesn’t need a marketing department.
You know the old saw that half the money spent on marketing is wasted, just nobody knows which half? Thanks to AI we now know it’s the half that’s spent on AI.
An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.
Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia’s entry, and it’s totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)
“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”
What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.
“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”
So the tl;dr review of grokipedia is literally “big if true.”
felt much more thorough and organized
You know what people say about judging a book by its cover an all that? Of course a lot of people will fall for the ‘it looks good’ trap. Which is one of the whole problems of genAI, that it creates cargo cult styled texts.
E: and came across a nice skeet describing the problem " To steal a Colbertism: these are truthiness machines."
KDE showing how it should be done:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html
Question:
I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.
Response:
We stopped posting on X for several reasons:
- The owner is a nazi
- The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
- (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
- Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.
Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.
We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.
The follow-up’s worth mentioning too:
It’s interesting they’re citing specifically DHH and Ladybird as examples to follow, considering:
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing
Think some of the KDE people are old school punkers so might not be a big shock.
common KDE W
Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/
It’s a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won’t copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:
- Grokipedia’s article on Wikipedia uses the word “ideological” or “ideologically” 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it’s Wikipedia article).
- Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “biological males”. The last paragraph of the article “The Wachowskis” is downright unhinged.
- The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.
Also certain articles have this at the bottom:
The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Decided to check the Grokipedia “article” on the Muskrat out of morbid curiosity.
I haven’t seen anything this fawning since that one YouTube video which called him, and I quote its title directly, “The guy who is saving the world”.
Interesting that for the musk article, it has the “see edits” button disabled. ha
To start this spooky Stubsack off, there’s signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:
Just a heads up I haven’t gotten a refund from my cancelled FW12 order. Framework seems to be having trouble figuring it out.
I don’t know why, maybe it is Canada or maybe it is a high volume of similar requests, but it is a sign I always find concerning in a company I am worried about the financial stability of.
Could be nothing, but if you have been wavering on a cancellation I figured you might want a heads up.
This comes two weeks after Framework’s public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. “Go fash, lose cash” proves itself again.
i’m trying to sell mine now
but also i don’t have any other computers and probably can’t afford anything
time for me to learn to use a pencil
The market should be flooded with used business laptops that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro
oh fuck, i didn’t think of that! thank you for the idea 💖
lightly used thinkpads are the classic choice for this — IT departments buy high spec ones then dump them for cheap a few years later in surplus sales or on eBay, and there are usually repair manuals and spare parts readily available. usually you can type the specific model and generation into a search and get a wiki page or at least a couple blog posts reporting how well they’re supported under linux, and Lenovo seems to intentionally do very well on compatibility since Linux compatibility is a nice checkbox for an enterprise laptop to have. just be careful you don’t get bamboozled into buying any of Lenovo’s consumer laptops, since they tend to be a fair bit cheaper and don’t have the same compatibility guarantees, repairability, or ample spare parts availability.
For sale: lenovo thinkpad, lightly used
-Earnest Hempingway
thank you for the suggestion, this is good stuff.
my laptop is a budget model from 2016 and it runs xfce smoothly and happily lol. i code on it and watch streams and play slay the spire and all the usual stuff. idk how the stylus changes things but the required specs for doing quite a lot with linux are negligible
Was on the lookout about a year ago, didn’t find promising enough back than, granted only checked a few places. Granted, I did want an ok GPU.
