Want to wade into the sandy 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.)
New article from Iris Meredith: Dewaffling the tech industry, about the tech industry’s tendency to create fascists and fash sympathisers, and how best to fix the issue
Good post but it’s overfocused on “technical” as a meaningful and helpful word for denotation. Quoting what I just said on Mastodon:
To be technical is to pay attention to details. That’s all. A (classical) computer is a detail machine; it only operates upon bits, it only knows bits, and it only decides bits. To be technical is to try to keep pace with the computer and know details as precisely as it does. Framed this way, it should be obvious that humans aren’t technical and can’t really be technical. This fundamental insecurity is the heart of priestly gatekeeping of computer science.
If a third blog post trying to define “technical” goes around again then I’ll write a full post.
A technical is a civilian vehicle (typically a pickup truck) modified with a system for mounting weapons (typically machine guns or heavier, crew-operated weaponry) on it. An ongoing debate among military philosophers concerns whether a zamboni with a T-shirt cannon should be classified as one.
An ongoing debate among military philosophers concerns whether a zamboni with a T-shirt cannon should be classified as one.
Strictly speaking, no. Whilst T-shirt cannons and other such armaments can cause serious injuries (a hot dog cannon hospitalised a Phillies fan in 2018), they aren’t weapons in any real sense.
We’re perhaps underrating the distribution of t-shirts with appropriately subversive messaging as a tactic in psychological operations. The sudden appearance of a zamboni, and distribution of assets via novel ballistic means, is also likely to drive enthusiasm among the target population.
is nobel committee fronting everyone on the next bubble?
So for my gaming needs I check reddit every now and then, and on phone it had after the comments ended a related answers section, which gave related answers 99% of them in the same sub.
Now they out some ai generated shit between that and the answers are just horrible generic slop.
Check out this answer for example: https://www.reddit.com/answers/3c67990a-d1a2-4f86-b1e4-c2f3bb54803d/
Very important context here. I was looking at the starsector subreddit. (A 2d arcade like space shooter) This is about a minecraft like building game. (Most of the advice is also useless (how to survive: ‘use mods!’).
I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.
September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss
September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m
(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)
They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.
An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed
(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)
Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.
Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)
As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”
[…]
Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.
Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565
Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.
If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.
Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a “boomer” thought in the stock market)
E: I had hoped this part was a bit and he would reflect more on it later.
I am not here to belittle AI, it’s the future, and I recognize that we’re just scratching the surface in terms of what it can do.
But turns out it wasn’t. What if this is it? (And im talking about AI as it exists now not some magical other tech from the future), the gpt 5 release was meh, we reached the end of the S-curve (or hit our (local) maximum, if non-S curve curves are more your thing). He even admits the tech doesn’t work that well in his own article.
How do we make the experience of dating apps even worse? With AI, of course:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps
The funniest bit is the guy who needed multiple exchanges with the ocean-boiling slop machine to come up with “Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you”.
“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”
According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).
“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”
She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.
I’m not sleeping on the job, I’m solving problems by lucid dreaming.
first read as lucid screaming
Isn’t that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing
(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)
Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?
e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines
i’m pretty sure that there’s an obscure stimulant that is some kind of giga-meth that lasts for 2d or more, that’d be more suitable for them
Mildly interesting thread about the progress of blacksky: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lzbeu2p
They’re aiming for full independence from bluesky, which is a laudable goal though not one they’ve achieved yet. They’re currently getting a reasonable amount of user funding rather than being a typical vc furnace (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) but I’m not sure what their plan is for moderation which is what will carry the project in the long term. I’d like to say it can’t be worse than bluesky, but moderation at scale is a nightmare.
one nice thing is that the migration process to the bluesky is painless and straightforward. if we had the ability to not only take our toots (export does exist) but also move them to a new mastodon server, that would be a very nice boon for the fediverse. (it’s also one of the oldest open tickets in mastodon’s github issues. and yes, i know of slurp, but that’s not really frictionless.)
An linkedin fesses up:
Claude Code has made me a dumber engineer.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:osg2vzhifd2tjfsvfwua7scy/post/3m2nhmlv3fk2r
I am jack’s completely and utterly unsurprised face
a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it’s “braincoded”
https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd
Apparently the red site couldn’t handle this one. Tags were changed from the descriptive perl to “vibecoding” and “satire”!
Is it just me or does it feel there’s a concerted effort to boost the AT protocol in tech venues? Maybe I’m paranoid but it does feel like a bit of openwashing going on.
I’m not really concerned about it. The overlap between people who give a shit about AT and people who don’t already use some kind of ActivityPub platform is microscopic. I’m happy to let Bluesky shoot itself in the foot by adopting the number one main thing people complain about Mastodon, namely the existence of multiple instances and having to choose from among them.
AIUI the AT protocol is in fact a bona fide open protocol with a Free (MIT/Apache-2.0) reference implementation available. If this is openwashing, I welcome this new style of openwashing where you actually publish open source software instead of just implying your proprietary software is not really proprietary.
AT is fashtech. This needs a proper writeup I realise, but it ticks too many boxes in theory and practice. I don’t welcome this style of openwashing, where it’s COMPLETELY OPEN except in all practice. Like, you could say the same about Urbit.
You know what, that’s fair enough. I was talking about a pretty narrow definition of openwashing, but obviously something just being libre software doesn’t make it good.
(raises hand)
I propose that Urbit heretofore be referred to as Norbit, as in the terrible movie.
By “openwashing” I mean the posts about AT protocol are running cover for Bluesky, the company. It’s basically reinforcing their narrative that if you don’t like what they’re doing, “just” start your own PDS. By focussing on the technical nitty-gritty, these posts ignore the structures in place keeping Bluesky in the dominant position.
An analogy, Bitcoin code is also open, but 1% of coin owners own like 90% of the coins. I’m not making any excuses for BTC here, but I seem to remember a bunch of similar articles breathlessly explaining how BTC “solves the Byzantine generals problem” while totally ignoring the ownership profile.
I agree that Bluesky’s attempts to not look monolithic have a certain flavor of opendetergent to them. However, I think their situation is a little more complex and quite a bit funnier. When the Bluesky people claim that their main thing is the protocol and the app was meant to be just a proof of concept, I’m inclined to believe them.
Bluesky is extremely popular among leftists and queer people and the company hates that. The right wingers seem content to stay on X the everything app and have little reason to switch even if Bluesky were to smoke the woke out and decimate its core userbase. The app needs to be popular for the protocol to stay even a little bit relevant.
Meanwhile Mastodon exists. It’s much more decentralized and a lot of people hate that. Bluesky users like having a single website with a single moderation authority, even if that moderation authority resents the demographics of that website.
If another twitter clone on AT Protocol somehow manages to gain enough of a critical mass to make Bluesky meaningfully not a monolith, that might well spell quick doom for the entire site. If AT makes migrating your account as easy as the developers are making it sound, I expect a big chunk of the users to jump ship as soon as an instance run by someone less transphobic gains enough traction.
I’ve mentioned before that I believe that Elon turning Twitter into a Nazi bar cut Bluesky’s business model off at its knees. They’re founded by Dorsey, weirdly (or cunningly) absent from the current techfash scene. I’ve always felt the vibe to be coiners and libertarians and “they can’t cancel you here”. Then they got a totally unearned user base because of X, and they’re simply not ready to handle it.
AFAIK there’s no revenue model, Jack or another VC is still footing the bill, and if there’s too much trans stuff on there the funding will dry up.
Good observation. I’d like to add that it’s not very straightforward to monetize a social networking site. The usual method would be ads, but the profit margins on those are thin, competition is rough and the audience does not like them. Otherwise you could probably derive monetary value from the soft power that comes with controlling a large communications platform of any kind, but it’s a lot harder to put a firm price tag on something like that and not everyone has the finesse and strategy to tap into that power.
Both of those monetization strategies work a hell of a lot better with a highly centralized and walled platform. Desperately trying to get people to pay more attention to the protocol that’s supposed to let them build competing sites with a low friction of migrating between them is the exact opposite of what you would do if you wanted your business model to be running a social networking site.
I would need someone with a big business brain to explain to me why a company focused on building the tools for competition against it and giving them away for free would ever seem like a sound investment. If I could give people VC money to publish telecommunications protocol specifications, I’d probably just sponsor IETF instead.
jwz ditching basecamp - decent discussion. tbh, I ctrl-f’d for the Jira sneers. Also includes a GitLab sneer that was not on my radar.
I read the disucssions and while I can sympathize with jwz’s ridicule of barely covered raw git, I think he’s asking for advice in the wrong place. There must be tons of solutions for running a small business with lots of part timers ,like a nightclub.
After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.
If you’re the kind of motherfucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of motherfucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.
Not that anyone should be in charge of that shitshow of a company, but hey!
Bonus sneer from the comment section:
Sam Altman in Feb 2015: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”
Sam Altman in Dec 2015, after co-founding OpenAI: “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Sam Altman 4 days ago, on his personal blog: “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation.”
After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.
I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.
Got another bonus sneer from the comments as well:
Polluting human knowledge with crap, making internet useless, taking away jobs from creative people by making things that look creative enough. Governments are complicit, politicians are bribed. Like that suck-up youtuber [Two Minute Papers] repeats, “What a time to be alive” right ?
(Sidenote: It massively fucking sucks how Two Minute Papers drank the AI Kool-Aid, I used to love that channel.)
I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.
No, it’s absolutely justified and I agree with basically everything he says in the video (esp. the title, there is really no reason for technology like this to exist in the hand of the public, or anyone really, there’s zero upsides to it). It’s just funny to me because the video is just so different from his usual calm stuff.
But honestly, good for him and (hopefully) his community too.
what are some of the all time most ludicrous and/or bigoted lesswrong posts? i am starting a podcast where my cohost and i show each other shockingly weird or bigoted texts and discuss them. mostly we’re doing historical ones but rationalist stuff is fair game
If you want a little hit of an unfair one, might want to look into the some of the weird manosphere guys who joined LW early on. Like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini.
E: Ah doesnt seem he wrote much (e: ah seems the site doesnt show the comments, change the ones it shows and they turn up): https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurini (or it got purged). Amazingly, he is actually not the worst: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPCKiEd2G8H3kkdnN/the-dark-arts-preamble?commentId=3nrQddAAYnZzegPt5
ah seems the site doesnt show the comments, change the ones it shows and they turn up
Oh man, I’ve found the old LW accounts of a few weird people and they didn’t have any comments. Now I’m wondering if they did and I just didn’t sort it
Does Anissimov count?
The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.
For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/04/18/human-biodiversity-part-7-lesswrong/
Scott’s Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don’t forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.
I will! @odiumsymposium on bsky in the meantime
Sadly I misremembered and this one wasn’t from LW but I’ll share it anyway. I think I had just finished reading a bunch of the “Most effective aid for Gaza?” reddit drama which was like a nuclear bomb going off, and then stumbled into this shrimp thing and it physically broke me.
If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
source: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think
Discussion here (special mention to the comment that says “Did the human pet guy write this”): https://awful.systems/comment/5412818
ooh finally I’ve got a second podcast to listen to other than BtB
It wasn’t on LW proper, but Yud endorsing a pedo science-fiction book as “basically Safe For Work” has to be up there.
https://awful.systems/post/2972738
Also PrimalPoly’s dating advice:
I think Yud’s “ethical solution” to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I’ve ever seen on LW.
(The whole thread is a doozy.)
Also amazing how he, who wants to teach others rationality, writes a post like that which such an obvious flaw. (How do you know you can trust the sign? What stops people abusing this by writing signs themselves?)
So much psychic damage (and also /r/brandnewsentence material) in that thread…
The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles.
edit: That’s not the alluded Yud’s solution btw
edit edit:
I still wouldn’t be all that tempted in his place, if pedophilia is merely a positive description. There’s little advantage in not being a pedophile.
Man rationalists from back when they didn’t worry about being youtube-ready were something else.
this post is so mentally damaging that seeing it here two years ago is one of my most vivid sneer memories
Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?
https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h
alt text
A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading
Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called “Al Slop Posters” that may violate our Community Guidelines. We’ve temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.
- Harmful language such as insults or slurs
- Unverified claims
- Appears intended to shame or abuse users
There are ‘user uses AI/has AI profile’ lists to they really are objecting to the word ‘slop’.
‘slop is a slur’ discourse incoming in T minus -100.
