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 ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ 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.)

  • BigMuffN69@awful.systems
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    2 hours ago

    Whitehouse AI czar (rightfully) imo pointing out that it’s pretty shit behavior to shout fire in a movie theatre and instead of admitting fault just typing ĀÆ_(惄)_/ĀÆ in chat

    PERHAPS WE SHOULD HAVE TITLED OUR PREDICTION AI 2027 DIFFERENTLY???

    The bailey: AI 2027 😱 The motte: ahem actually we had a footnote that said AI 2030, so we don’t need feel the need to retract/apologize/or slightly edit our fearmongering website.

    Let this be an albatross around scoots neck forever lmaou.

    • BigMuffN69@awful.systems
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      2 hours ago

      Me in 2027 when the AI hasn’t turned me and the rest of ya’ll into corgis yet ;_;

      (yes this actually happens in their most likely scenario forecast)

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    3 hours ago

    Mozilla continues to double down on AI, promising to ā€œdo for AI what we did for the webā€ in their latest (probably AI-extruded) blogpost.

    In related news, I found a toot thread attributing the current shitfest (and AI’s popularity in general) to ā€œa strong majority of even the actually well-intentioned, smart leaders in tech [getting] their brains fully cooked by these heuristics machinesā€. Where the OP is finding those ā€œwell-intentioned, smart leadersā€, I do not know.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    8 hours ago

    Checked back in on Framework’s rotting corpse.

    The company’s retired their official Discord server (in the Blade Runner sense), about a month after the mod team jumped ship over the company’s fash turn. There’s discussion on the Framework forums about it, too.

    Its not the only social media platform they’ve abandoned - they left Bluesky and Mastodon to court fascists on Twitter a while ago.

    • smiletolerantly@awful.systems
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      4 hours ago

      All the fash stuff is incredibly bad, but I cannot get over this:

      I personally found a lot of enjoyment in the Framework discord. The format of a discord server is a lot more useful for chatting and discussion within a community than something like a forum (which seems a little more siloed).

      WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. EITHER YOU ARE INSANE OR I AM.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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        11 hours ago

        Okay, quick TL;DR:

        Subnautica is a video game made by Unknown Worlds - their first game released in 2018, and the sequel’s been delayed to 2026 after some major development shakeups in July 2025 (namely, Unknown World CEO Ted Gill and co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire getting fired)

        Krafton, who acquired Unknown Worlds in 2021, are currently being sued by Gill, Cleveland and McGuire. The company stands accused of screwing the three out of $250 mil in bonuses that a release into Early Access would’ve helped them earn.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems
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      8 hours ago

      will these guys ever get to rainbow-chart levels of galaxy brain or will just be content to fudge some numbers on regular visuals?

      This is reminiscent of memestock/buttcoin charts where a new asymptomatic curve is dropped onto the same rather flat graph over and over again.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      14 hours ago

      It’s a logarithmic plot to begin with and they still feel the need to make the curve exponential lol.

      I’m sure they have a rigorous and objective metric for what coding tasks take how long at what success rate for humans.

    • BioMan@awful.systems
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      17 hours ago

      I look forward to the cultists continuing to update these graphs convinced they are seeing the future of the cosmos as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the fever dreams

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    19 hours ago

    Saw a video talking about Google officially releasing ā€œnano banana proā€ which i regret to inform you is a real product and that the video was not a shitpost.

  • hrrrngh@awful.systems
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    22 hours ago

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/harnessing-hybrid-intelligence/202511/the-psychology-of-collective-abandonment

    Article I found randomly because… I was trying to add the Psychology Today blog to uBlacklist so I stop seeing their articles lol

    It lost me a little towards the end, but it’s heartwarming to imagine a world where tech fascists screaming about the Antichrist have a few* billion dollars less and actual charities have a few more.

    *where few = [3, āˆž)

    • blakestacey@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      Grok:

      In the absurd arena of ultimate determination challenges, yes—Elon Musk has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history, leveraging his proven grit from surviving corporate near-deaths and endless failures.

      (via Parker Molloy)

  • JFranek@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is… uh… not good.

    But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.

    https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l

    Transcript:

    The fact I can login every morning and ask an AI to review all my emails and chats from yesterday then given what it knows about my goals and my role it should suggest what I could have done better is amazing.

    Bubble or not, AI is huge for personal productivity and overall improvement.

    • froztbyte@awful.systems
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      9 hours ago

      slightly OT veering to the point: I try to maintain a relatively diverse set of feeds on muh socials, including finding people from other cultures and backgrounds in that. and yet I’d ended up muting this person some months ago for constantly being very Thotleader with borderline populist ā€œedgyā€ takes that always have some pernicious shit wrong with it

      this skeet is a perfect example of it.

      • JFranek@awful.systems
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        8 hours ago

        Yeah, I found his credulousness about "AI"quite amusing. Like when he went to a wrong station in Japan, because he asked ChatGPT. And posted about it, not realizing how much of a dumbass it made him look like. But it’s starting to wear off.

        But hey, he at least admits there is a bubble.

        And also, I haven’t unfollowed/muted/blocked Mike Masnick yet. And he’s at least twice as annoying about AI.

        Unrelated: Did chrome just detect me writing about AI to shill Gemini to me? (puts on tinfoil hat)

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      15 hours ago

      They say the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but outsourcing the examination to an LLM gives you more time to hustle and grind, maximizing financial returns. That’s what they mean, right?

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        8 hours ago

        relatedly, Josh Johnson’s video about this is pretty great. I’m afk rn but I’ll get a link soon and update

        e: link

      • zogwarg@awful.systems
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        12 hours ago

        Of course! It’s to know less and less, until truly, the only thing they know is that they know nothing.

    • nightsky@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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        24 hours ago

        Most likely the latter - Gerard’s already done a couple Pivot to AI posts about AI’s ability to lobotomise its users (Exhibit A, Exhibit B). Someone else has noted their coworker admitting to the lying machine ruining their Google-fu, too (source):

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          3 hours ago

          Recently my research lead recounted a meeting among the senior people, where they hammered out a bunch of project pitches. Some of the wording was still a little rough, but they were going to pass it all through DeepL anyway, to make it read good. Also everyone’s bad at spellling these days, since you got a thing that autocompletes for you, right? They were proud they remembered how to spell ā€œcontinuousā€.

          Sure, everyone has days they can’t word good, but this starts sounding like worrying de-skilling. These people spend a good portion of their paid time working on and arguing over wording.

        • zogwarg@awful.systems
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          22 hours ago

          To be fair though it’s not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    10 hours ago

    I feel like ā€œwe’ll just build a world modelā€ is on the same level as saying " we’ll just solve the P vs NP problem."

    img text

    How to draw an owl:

    1. draw some circles. (drawing of circles)
    2. draw the rest of the fucking owl. (very skillful and detailed drawing of an owl)
  • nfultz@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher

    All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.

    Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.

    Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled ā€œhallucinationsā€). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.

    They’ve always wanted this, indeed. There’s some comfort to me in the reminder that this year’s layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    1 day ago

    NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.