Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 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 so 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.)
HOPE (Hackers on planet earth, a hacker convention) tried to invite some AI companies people as speakers and the reactions has been interesting
We have reached out to people at some of the major AI companies in the list below, asking them to speak at this yearās HOPE conference to start an open dialog about AI. Yet, in every case, when the representatives of the AI companies learned that their talk would not be allowed to be a mere unchallenged sales pitch, they became significantly less interested. And when they learned we would allowā and encourageā audience members to ask questions, the representatives stopped responding to us altogether. This happened with each and every company.
As expected. Itās grifting the whole way down, never about āsafetyā but always about money
In local Boston-area sneering:
This is the map that City Councilors Miniard Culpepper (Roxbury) and Brian Worrell (Dorchester) used yesterday as part of their case to build an Orange Line extension down Blue Hill Avenue. As if we needed more proof that friends donāt let friends use generative AI. How many mistakes can you find?
āArlington Heightsā has materialized on the Commuter Rail line I took every day to Brandeis, North Station is no longer on the Green Line, Government Center is now the second Park Street, backup copies of State and DTX have appeared for good measure, Boylston and Arlington have departed for the realm of the A branch, along with the Braintree branch of the Red Lineā¦ I never knew the āwhatās wrong with this pictureā puzzles in the Sunday funnies would be such good training for evaluating computer technology.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/
So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as āAIā. If you donāt call the stuff you work with āAIā, you arenāt saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.
The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of āgenAIā which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR).
OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before āgenAIā and will be true after.
Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesnāt mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of āgenAIā in research.
I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.
Larry Sanger, who has spent decades concern-trolling Wikipedia to promote false balance in the name of āneutralityā, has finally pissed off enough editors there that the community has booted his ass.
Background:
From his rationalwiki page, omg he is an āantifa did the coupā guy.
I have discovered from an unrelated Google search that there is a subreddit called r/TherapyGPT. Weāre in hell
someone linked me a screenshot of the āclaude helped me figure out Iām transā post (from there) and whew, that oneās a real ride
Some of us figured it out after writing two novels with gender-flipped self-portraits as main characters, just as god intended
Gonna make r/TherapyELIZA
New Odium Symposium episode: we look at Pulitzer prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer and his pretentious and racist best-of collection, Things That Matter.
https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/19-nightmare-161582344
Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
he was most frustrated a couple of weeks back when people called bullshit on his previous round of takes about this
there continues to be a rather particular shade of selfishness involved in each these-shape takes I keep seeing. itās always about how the prompt is for them, how dare anyone else not believe them? and what do you mean externalities weāre not talking about power plants weāre talking about them
itās exhausting
Ugh, *yes. *
And I really do sympathise with the urge to avoid being seen as extreme (imagine being percieved! by people!) but that urge leads so many clued-in folks to pose the problem of bullshit engines as a halved-loaf problem when itās a halved-baby situation, and the opposition isnt going to give anyone credit for being nice in the newapaper.
My experience is that almost all these cases are effectively āChatGPT are fixing my attention problemsā (not necessarily full ADHD, just people feeling itās easier with an impulsion no matter how random) For me, itās worth paying attention too, but more in the sense āwhat does it reveal in people ?ā
Edit : also, one of his example :
"find my typos.ā It finds a lot of the errors that are normally not caught by a regular spell checker: doubled-up words, punctuation marks, or words that are actual words but are misspellings for other words.
2005 spell checkers find all of these reasonably well.
(and, in fact, the only two reasonable examples he give is the innocence project - but itās an attention span thing - and the full text indexing one which is the exact use case LLMs were developped for and is inherently non generative)
Do we have to believe gamblers who say theyāve got a āsystemā?
Hey, dont mock the gamblers and their systems. One of them actually works. You just need infinite money for it.
only 8% of the time
I had some good fun learning about the different roulette systems recently. along with how many places say theyāre typeA when theyāre typeB
but then they do operate in a target rich environment :|
Yah and sign up for their newsletter too
I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one youāre essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who arenāt going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless theyāre right on the margins somehow, and that āsomehowā is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that itās embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldnāt also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how theyāre used.
I just today stumbled upon maia arson crimewās writeup on a tiktok account named based<r-slur>gang and their connection to remilia. and I justā¦ what? What the fuck is remilia. I thought they were a weird nft company for dimes square losers. anyway this post has most likely been posted to a sneerclub before but I wanted to post it anyway because what the fuck
Iām reminded of the aesthetic definition of fascism: an artistic movement is fascist when it has no substance beyond its aesthetic presentation. Most artists want to express some sort of cultural belief, communicating it to their audience. However, fascists do not sincerely endorse any meme whatsoever, because of their need for cultural purity and their inability to establish a rubric by which their national identity cleanly separates from the society which hosts them; rather, a fascist movement predictably sheds memes, one by one, as their usefulness for advancing the movement is overcome by the fascistās revulsion at any sort of cultural sincerity.
Thanks for sharing. This has a lot in common with e.g. hyperborean or tradwife communities, I feel. Not in the specific memes as such, but in the utter lack of sincere existence behind them.
Semiotic voids.
You really nailed it here; theyāre human slop chefs.
Pink nihilism, with bits of sadism and fascism. Lovely.
I curse the day I found out what remilia was.
AHH THE FUCKIN MILADY CREW
fuck
Theyāre fucking awful. I clicked through the xitter thread to someone with a milady pfp and they seemed to be shilling a crypto trading/sports betting platform called ourbit, which gave me a bit of a shock. I havenāt dug deep into it because I am currently hiking in Estonia, so it might have no significance whatsoever, but I think remilia is somewhat connected to urbit so there might be a connection there
e: typo
yeah bet on their blog they posted urbit 101 beginners guide. not linking that for obvious reasons
with such tenure i wonder if some of these people are interns or something in current american administration
ponzi scheme capitalists: and weāre going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore
me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody
ponzi scheme capitalists: weāre also going to hoard all SSDs
me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books
ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours
me: ļ½®ļ¾Šļ¾)o
Nothing drives away the āare we the baddies?ā thoughts like the warmth coming off a book pyre.
āThe assumption is: you have to physically own the books and destroy them after āreadingā them ā in order to argue that no unauthorized copy remains in circulation and that it qualifies as fair use,ā the bookseller says of the presumed logic behind it.
Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, Iām pretty sure that Iām not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and thatās ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.
Complementing sibling, consider Google Books. This is where the question first arose: if one puts a book through a scanner, non-destructively, then surely they have made a digital copy of the book? Thereās the related question: if the scanner destroys the book, then that surely means no copy? The bounds of this were tested with the concept of CDL, which courts did rule against in Hachette v. Internet Archive; they said that CDL is clearly copying. But they also said in HathiTrust that digital preservation is transformative. So preserving is possibly fair but copying is probably infringing; in general one can have a private library but they canāt copy it out to other people.
Hopefully it makes a bit more sense from that perspective. Copyrightās still stupid as fuck, though. Previously, on Awful, I made a prediction:
I do think that the resulting incentive for model-trainers is not what anybody wants, though; Google Books is still settled and Kadrey didnāt get updated, so model-trainers now merely must purchase second-hand books at market price and digitize them, just like Google has been doing for decades. At worst, this is a business opportunity for a sort of large private library which has pre-digitized its content and sells access for the purpose of training models.
Alsup put this as a point in Anthropicās favour in the recent authorial class action, so now itās received wisdom.
How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.
City officials are encouraging residents to interact with Dubbotāask questions, take selfies, and experience firsthand how AI is shaping public safety. The goal is to foster transparency and gather feedback to refine the robotās role in the community.
The person-sized, camera-covered robot that looked like it rolled right out of a sci-fi movie did not identify any criminal incidents, issue any tickets or help with any arrests in its nearly 10 months on the job.
On the other hand, I bet it didnāt shoot anyoneās dog, so whoās to say that the $64k was wasted.
What I find most interesting in all this is that none of the coverage Iāve seen has said that crimes happened in its vicinity that it failed to detect, only that it didnāt issue any citations or whatever. Which is wild if you consider that they basically had it doing laps of a parking garage or whatever. You would think that if it was encouraging people to not rob those cars or whatever that it was doing its job, much like how ostensibly a speed camera is supposed to discourage people from speeding rather than just issue fines.
Donāt get me wrong, Iām not saying that this obelisk-looking-ass robopig was actually succeeding, I just think that the criteria being used to declare it a failure say some really bad things about the state of policing.
I never understand how these things arenāt simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes thereās cameras and GPS locators etc. but thereās ways around that, itās not that hardā¦
I wouldnāt want to do that myselfā¦ personally too much tracking gear in there, and itās easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, theyāll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.
Now, Iām more surprised that they donāt get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but youād expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.
Or somebody talking the bot into driving of stairs/into a river. If it ever freezes enough getting it on ice will also be fun.
10 year olds will have so much fun with these things.
Hereās one from the archives: https://spectrum.ieee.org/children-beating-up-robot
Children Beating Up Robot Inspires New Escape Maneuver System
tl;dr: small children have no empathy for your robot and will torture it and hound it to death if they can. The safest thing to do is to head for the nearest adult-sized people, who will hopefully be less inclined to kill it simply because it is a robot.
New findings in Bayesian tragedy
The inspection is being led by the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Angelo Vittorio Cavallo. According to Italian news outlets, the technical and investigative team is evaluating whether the crew underestimated the rapidly worsening weather conditions and whether the measures taken to weather the storm were adequate.
The Bayesian went down in the early hours of 19 August 2024 near Porticello, close to Palermo, while at anchor. The tragedy claimed seven lives, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, shipās cook Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda.
The yachtās captain, James Cutfield, along with crew members Tim Eaton and Matthew Griffith, are under investigation.
time to update our priors
Wasnāt this the boat that everyone was like āyeah itās gonna fall over in a stiff wind which is pretty bad for a sailboatā only to be overruled because money? And now the captain and crew who were actually willing to sign on are being investigated.
shame about the cook
If you switch to a new kind of tainted beef, thatās updating your prions
If you place your head in the beam line, thatās updating your pions
The traditional way to exchange brain worms has been replaced by LW forum tho
https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism
Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldnāt date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.
More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said theyād consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.
? the kids are alright ?
Polymarket was caught faking winnings via influencers Wonder if they paid any of our āfriendsā, or if they promoted it all for free.
Given how our very good friends were promoting the concept of prediction markets for ideological/idiot-logical reasons before polymarket existed Iām pretty sure they didnāt need to be bribed or set up. Just let them show off that someone actually made the real thing they were pitching as a concept a decade ago and pretend all the issues donāt exist.
Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.
Today (actually sourced to Perunās video from a few weeks back but I watched it today) in Everything is Connected:
One of the advancements in one-way attack drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the move to directly-connected fiber optic cables for control. This has proven an effective way to counter electronic warfare, but has also meant that both sides have started using a volume of fiber optic cable that boggles the mind. This made the single fiber optic manufacturer in Russia a substantial strategic target, which Ukraine obligingly took advantage of. In turn, this has forced Russia to rely completely on imports, placing the Russian war effort in direct competition with Chinaās AI datacenter buildout for this now-vital resource.
China being a proudly socialist country, this allowed the fiber optic manufacturers to raise their prices through the roof and absolutely take the Russians (and presumably their AI customers) to the cleaners.
Never let it be said that there are no AI-tangential stories that you canāt feel at least a little bit good about, even if it is just the endless grift nexus capturing an even bigger bastard.
The staggering amount of resources being poured into warehouses of machines that run code that create plausible text is mindblowing. A lot of stuff is ongoing cost too.
For something which ā as far as Iāve seen ā can halfarse busywork nobody cares about, steal code from github/approximate yaasnippet if you donāt mind having to review code made with ducttape and a dream, or sort of act like a DM with alzheimers for very lonely people.
What are we even doing here? Even if governments think āOh well we better trial it a bit because maybe itāll be usefulā why would you expend so much human life on a slim possibility.
Iāll yes-and you, Ukraine faces higher costs also, ie https://dronexl.co/2026/05/11/ukraine-fiber-optic-spool-price-ai-data-center-demand/
now serving with Ukraineās Unmanned Systems Forces, said in a May 10 post on X that his unit used to buy 50-kilometer fiber optic spools for $300. Today, he said, āitās easily $2,500.ā
China makes money on both sides, plus the data centers you mentioned. Compare/contrast with Iran, who switched from GPS to Chinese nav to also get around jamming because leashes donāt get that longā¦ and China also makes money.
But locally, my BIL who runs fiber for a rural ISP, says basically they still make way more on recycling the copper wire they pull out than they pay for fiber. IDK.
yeah china just makes things, i doubt that iranian military ever had a shot at getting american gnss receivers. any of modern civilian ones allows for use of signals from all 4 constellations anyway, and the jamming resistance comes from either using encrypted signals or by using more sophisticated receivers that have tiny phased array and can cut out a zone where jammer is (to some degree)
AI shite creeping into everyday life, example #1928748392:
I was out mattress shopping today. It was enjoyably ridiculous - the sales assistant measured my āpillow sizeā using a big contraption (apparently Iām a 2). However while testing a mattress I saw a video display advertising an āAIā widget to go with a specific āmotionā mattress.
Baffled, I searched this up later.
AI voice control & Anti-snore box
Create your own spa-like oasis from the comfort of your own home by combining this Anti-snore Voice Control Box with our U210 and N700 motion bases. This range combines the very best and innovative technology with unbeatable comfort to give you the ultimate relaxation experience. Whether you want the optimal sleeping position or to spend your evenings unwinding with a good book, set offers luxurious comfort at the tip of your fingers.
I think this is un-enjoyably ridiculous. Itās not really clear whatās āAIā about it.
Imagine sleeping by lying down and closing your eyes peasant.
I guess the voice recognition probably used some kind of machine learning?
It seems possible, but they donāt actually explainā¦
