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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025

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 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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

317 comments

  • snrk

    https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

    I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

    • Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I'm dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

    • Um, actually it’s called a typestate.

  • So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with "We’re living through a technological paradigm shift."... and right there I didn't bother reading the rest of it because I don't want to expose my brain to it further.

    But what I found funny is that also today, there's this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

    So Hololens is discontinued... you know... AR... the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.

    • Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

      It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

      Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

      With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [...], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

      (Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

      It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

      Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).

      I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

      Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

  • Small FYI, not a sneer or anything, you can stop reading if you don't know what the godotengine is. But if you do and hear of the fork, you can just ignore the fork. (the people involved also seem to be rather iffy, one guy who went crazy after somebody mentioned they would like gay relationships in his game, and some maga conspiracy theory style coder. That is going by the 3 normal people the account follows (out of 5) who I assume are behind it).

    • amazing work they've achieved so far though

      yes, that's the complete change set for the fork

      oh and a Godot discord moderator turned out to be extremely into dropping n-words in chat

    • There's a new fork of Godot!

      It's called Lolidot, because of course it is

      it's going great too

    • god these people are fucking losers

    • from the godot discord:

      godotclayjohn • 20h ago •

      fund.godotengine.org!

      Obviously I can't share access to the backend, but the numbers on the side are kept up to date. Last week we went down by about €5,000 when a corporate sponsorship expired.

      Since Friday morning we lost €170/month in sponsorships but gained €1,610/month in new sponsorships. In terms of numbers of people: 10 people have cancelled their donations so far and 74 new people have signed up.

      go woke, go 1400 EUR ahead and lose a pile of shitheads you never wanted

      • the chuds have done their usual thing of throwing themselves on the ground and acting extremely injured by being blocked for violating the CoC of an open source project (via Liam at GamingOnLinux):

        what’s fucked is this is the exact same playbook as NixOS and Python, though this time Godot doesn’t seem to be taking any shit and that seems to be preventing those tactics from working. weird how easy it is to weather shit like this when you have a fucking spine and aren’t trying to retain fascist assholes

      • ahahaha that’s amazing

        it also pushed me to start learning Godot since its community seems awesome, and that’s definitely showing through on the docs so far — they go into so much depth on why Godot’s designed like it is, and what specifically it’s good for

        I’ve only just started, but it’s reminding me very positively of what Unreal Engine was for a brief period of time: a runtime for a powerful domain-specific scripting language that could be extended by native code when needed, targeting indie devs

        unfortunately Tim Sweeney kind of sucks at designing languages (though he used to do it a lot) so UnrealScript was a real fucking mess, and UE never really captured the indie market (cause you had to pay a fuckload for the privilege of writing native code) so UnrealScript got excised and the engine became “free” (as in free timeshare) and entirely refocused on developers pumping out AAA garbage and other whales (and, more charitably, anyone who needs an engine that can do state of the art graphics)

        Godot, so far, to me feels kind of like an Unreal Engine that didn’t fuck up with the indie market and also isn’t closed source greedware

        also apparently there’s a new Unreal scripting language? it’s got the Haskell guy behind it and it’s functional which is cool, but it’s also already bathed in horseshit:

        Verse is the new scripting language for Unreal Engine, first implemented in Fortnite.[11] Simon Peyton Jones, known for his contributions to the Haskell programming language, joined Epic Games in December 2021 as Engineering Fellow to work on Verse with his long-time colleague Lennart Augustsson and others.[12] Conceived by Sweeney,[13] it was officially presented at Haskell eXchange in December 2022 as an open source functional-logic language for the metaverse.[14] A research paper, titled The Verse Calculus: a Core Calculus for Functional Logic Programming, was also published.[15]

        The language was eventually launched in March 2023 as part of the release of the Unreal Editor for Fortnite (UEFN) at the Game Developers Conference, with plans to be available to all Unreal Engine users by 2025.[11]

        so I guess Fortnite modders can weigh in on how good Haskell for Gaming is

        e: also, imagine if any of these pro gamers knew Godot is the Cassette Beasts and Cruelty Squad engine

  • I got this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY in my inbox, because once your email appears on a single published paper you're forever doomed to garbage like this (transcript at the end):

    Highlights:

    • Addresses me as Dr. I'm not a doctor. I checked, and apparently Dr. Muhhamad Imran Qureshi indeed has a PhD and is a lecturer at Teesside University International Business School (link to profile). His recent papers include a bunch of blockchain bullshit. Tesside University appears to be a legit UK university, although I'm not sure how legit the Business School is (or how legit any Business School can be, really).
    • Tells us their research is so shit that using wisdom woodchippers actually increases their accuracy.
    • One of the features is "publication support", so this might be one of those scams where you pay an exorbitant fee to get "published" in some sketchy non-peer-reviewed journal.
    • One of the covered AI tools is Microsoft Excel. If you were wondering if "AI" had any meaning.
    • Also, by god, are there so many different ChatGPT clones now? I haven't heard most of those names. I kinda hope they're as AI as Excel is.

    I'm not sure which would be worse, this being a scam, or them legit thinking this brings value to the world and believing they're helping anyone.

  • A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.

    PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called "codesmith," and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it's an ad.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/

    The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.

    • that thread’s so dense with marketing patterns and critihype, it’s fucking shameless. whenever anyone brings up why generative AI sucks, the OP “yes and”s it into more hype — like when someone brings up how LLMs shit themselves fast if they train on LLM-generated text, the fucker parries it to a “oh the ARM guy said he’s investing in low-hallucination LLMs and that’ll solve it”. like… what? no it fucking will not, those are two different problems (and throwing money at LLMs sure as fuck doesn’t seem to be fixing hallucinations so far either way)

      the worst part is this basic shit seems to work if the space is saturated with enough promptfondlers. it’s the same tactic as with crypto, and it’s why these weird fucks always want you on their discord, and why they always try to take up as much space as possible in discussions outside of that. it’s the soft power of being able to shout down dissenting voices.

  • Folks, I need some expert advice. Thanks in advance!

    Our NSF grant reviews came in (on Saturday), and two of the four reviews (an Excellent AND a Fair, lol) have confabulations and [insert text here brackets like this] that indicate that they are LLM generated by lazy people. Just absolutely gutted. It's like an alien reviewed a version of our grant application from an parallel dimension.

    Who do I need to contact to get eyes on the situation, other than the program director? We get to simmer all day today since it was released on the weekend, so at least I have an excuse to slow down and be thoughtful.

317 comments