Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy Pride :3)
Yaāll seein this shit?
thereās no anime avatar, how do we know itās really Elon?
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?
Tired: brain rot
Wired: brain soap
This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because thereās at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
Iām gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacekās screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.
AI audio transcription is great.
https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987
Sean Murray @NoMansSky
Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.
Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.
Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.
LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said
eugenics, saas edition
sigh
Possibly OT, but fits in with the āfinance ruins everythingā motif weāve got going here:
My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.
Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this personāleftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my typeāand asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, āwill be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lolā. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I donāt want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
āOh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that Iām using to handle theā, I swear to Gods Iām not making this up, āMATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing andā¦ā. Desperate emphases mine.
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would āsmartlyā mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was āhaha yeah, mathlab is hardā.
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
A) āWhy pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student theyād probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.ā -My wife
B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I canāt believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI itās definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in Godās chosen timeline.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *theyād* use ChatGPT nowadays then youād be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/
I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, Iām sure, and then it wonāt actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are youāre using R or something, if youāre doing genetics on Excel at all youāre probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.
Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick bodyā¦
mathrix laboratory
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
āMicrosoft Excelā¦would āsmartlyā mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.ā
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . Iām not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. Itās a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase ādonāt be evilā, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
Iāve just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.
Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I donāt usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his āentrepreneurial mindsetā, though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways (āJust ask it!ā), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 āpenicillin-eventsā in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.
It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadnāt touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldnāt matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didnāt leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPoās jumping headfirst into it.
For those of you who havenāt already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think theyāve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
Thereās some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (āyou must be prompting it wrongā), but assume that they somehow just donāt know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But itās clear that theyāre not aware of the issue enough right now.
Thereās some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term āneural howlroundā to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I havenāt read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because weāre not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with āsorry, we really arenāt equipped to help youā
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn weāve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
congrats, thatās awesome news!
Congrats! :D
Congrats!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if Iām understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends wonāt join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
Thatās a whole lotta words to say āIām a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.ā
heās not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess thatās fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that heās taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, āget gudā. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
fwiw, thereās a telling detail about ptaÄekās attitude to people who he doesnāt see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when heās not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.
itās either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.
This almost reads like tptacek doesnāt understand why lucidityās piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
Iād have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like itās a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe Iām just a vibe coding Youtuber.
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think itās the first time Iāve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. itās written like someoneās idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesnāt give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that donāt stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now Iām wondering if tpacekās been reading us and thatās why heās upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog
@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldnāt let me.
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
I bet youāre right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if itās so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course heās not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with
