4d ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025 - awful.systems

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

97 comments

Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.
The view of the garbage fractal isn't improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.
- Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.

currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570
this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer
no, they have not yet factored 35
but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits
anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?
(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)
- I unfortunately know jack shit about quantum computing, so I can't really weigh in, but I am rooting for them to pull it off, because PsiQuantum getting all the VC money ever means AI stops getting all the VC money ever
  
  Hey, if we boil the oceans via quantum research, at least we might get some new physics out of it.

New webbed brief from Heydon
https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

New artcle from Brian Merchant: An 'always on' OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Device^tm, I think Merchant's correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Device^tm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Device^tm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian's noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Device^tm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI's public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley's reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Device^tm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.

New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:
What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible
LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev

Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he's a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed's just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
- Not advocating violence, but Achewood did demonstrate one possible set of reactions to discovering a Microsoft designer at large in public.
  https://achewood.com/2007/07/05/title.html
- this one is a joke, i think. he is definitely on the fashy bullshit though
- It's not healthy for me to have my biases confirmed like this.
  
  But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!
- @BlueMonday1984 lol @ "I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way"
  Also why do you even put a React Dev on that task 🤡
  
  “I try not to let [performance] considerations get in the way
  You could show me this without any context whatsoever and my first thought would've been "did a React dev say that"
  
  :(

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!
- Noice!

time amplifying the nonsense around saltman’s orb grift
features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies

Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
Do we know if Anthropic named their (technically garbage) "Agentic AI" protocol MCP in refence to the antagonist of the TRON movie?
And if it is: Holy shit can tech dudes just stop showing us how little they understand text or anything? Like, we understand. You can't read.

I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:
It doesn't even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn't plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn't do.

NEW ZITRON DROPPED
- In the collection of links of what Ive has done in recent years, there's one to an article about a turntable redesign he worked on, and from that article:
  The Sondek LP12 has always been entirely retrofittable and Linn has released 50 modular hardware upgrades to the machine, something that Ive said he appreciates. "I love the idea that after years of ownership you can enjoy a product that's actually better than the one you bought years before," said Ive.
  I don't know, should I laugh, or should I scream, that it's Ive, of all people, saying that.
- I don't get it, how is every one of the most touted people in the AI space among the least credible people in the industry.
  Like literally every time its a person whose name I recognize from something else they've done, that something else is something I hate.
- ED ZITRON
  FROM THE TOP ROPE

New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
- In a world that chases status, be prestigious
  I'll keep that in mind....
- Reminds me something F.D. Signifier said on a music podcast.
  Progressives are losing the cultural war in a lot of ways, but they'll always need us because we're the ones pushing the boundaries on art, and it turns out, no matter how ghoulish people want to act, everyone has genuine love of fucking awesome art. The true loss condition is being captured by the tools of the master.
- this is ridiculously good
- Rekindled a desire to maybe try my own blog ^^.
  I think beyond "Keeping up appearances" it's also the stereotype of fascists—and by extension LLM lovers—having trouble (or pretending to) distinguishing signifying and signified.

Curtis Yarvin:
Girls think the "eu" in "eugenics" means EW. Don't get the ick, girls! It literally means good.
So if you're not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what
dr. caitlin m. green:
... how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7
- Seeing Yarvin mansplain eugenics really does make one wonder how he doesn't just get suckerpunched whenever he says anything at someone in public.
- Not beating the sexism allegations.
- The eigenrobot thread he's responding to is characteristically bizarre and gross. You'd think eigenrobot being anti-eugenics is a good thing but he still finds a way to make it suspect. (He believes being unable to make babies is worse than death?)
  
  I think he means "mass sterilisation of a population" Vs "mass murder of the same population", which is genocide either way, and then he would opt for the faster method.
  Or something. Feels extra creepy discussing which genocide is better with the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
- sounds like he's posting from inside a dilapidated white panel van parked strategically just outside a legally-mandated exclusion radius surrounding a middle school
  
  So, he's essentially Drake if he got into AI doom

A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that aren't on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forest... i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).
I don't know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the corner... well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really aren't showing the models' raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.
- I like how all of the currently running attempts have been equipped with automatic navigation assistance, i.e. a pathfinding algorithm from the 60s. And that's the only part of the whole thing that actually works.
  
  I wouldn't say even that part works so well, given how Mt. Moon is such a major challenge even with all the features like that.

I regret to inform you that, once again, aella (via this)
fucked that this is at least moderately honest
- Cringe but my god the horde of buttmad nazis force me to be on weirdo & girl girl's side
  Personally I have more questions about a Rationalist having an anarcho-communist flag tattoo.
  
  anarcho-communist flag, username RatOrthodox, hangs out with eugenicist iq-anon types, somewhere on the longtermist scale. Has unblocked replies from a person who fell into all the alt-right signifiers and who is calling this 'Jewish' (anti-semitism and a holocaust joke, classy. If I sneer any harder I will start to look like Scott on that recent video).
- Ok I have to say, I despise aella but as a promiscuous woman I completely fail to see what's supposed to be the problem with this particular form of play. That people like having casual sex? That they have slut pride? What.
  I probably passed the 100 mark myself several years ago, I've hooked up with girls with much more obvious slut tattoos too, and we're all antifascist anarchists. Is this community ok with sneering at public sexuality now?
  The only thing I found vaguely mid in that X is using a tattoo gun rather than scarification, branding, or at least stick-and-poke. But I don't kink-shame people for being casuals.
  
  Personally I like sex work and amateur tattooing better when they aren't part of some convoluted attempt at rationalist virtue signalling on social media. Honestly it's kind of weird that you landed on disapproval of promiscuity as the reason anyone here would find the happy couple sneerable.
  Not strictly related to the OP but fuck kink-washing sfba rationalism, at the very least the attempted normalization of non-con sex play in a subculture as inundated with cult dynamics as them should be fair game.
  
  oh, no, to be clear: this isn't about the sex/sluttiness - I have no issue with that at all. in a more general sense (over the wider set of things aella), her positioning herself as a "sex researcher" but often using that to bash specific groups or put out a specific narrative, that is far more problematic
  but regarding this specific thing, tho: the "forced a tattoo on me" bit specifically, and all the rationalists doing their weird quasi-intellectual arguing with everyone who asks questions. the "forced" wording feels ... intentionally bait&switch? presumably (..hopefully?) there's mutual consent here, so it's a fucking choice to go frame the event that way
- This is more on Aella Cult than on her tbh.
  And didn't Aella and also Grimes have a come to jesus moment when they realized they hung out with a lot of bad people. Guess nothing came from that. (That part of them is always worse than these just a bit off antics they pull).
  
  And didn’t Aella and also Grimes have a come to jesus moment when they realized they hung out with a lot of bad people
  I would give this at least -9600 credibility points. neither of them are whoopsie-daisy'ing into these scenes and crowds, they both knew what and who

Im sure this is fine https://infosec.exchange/@paco/114509218709929701
"Paco Hope #resist @paco@infosec.exchange
OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you don’t have to!
“CoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesn’t know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access won’t show up in audit logs.”
The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"

Another critihype article from the BBC, with far too much credulousness at the idea behind supposed AI consciousness at the cost of covering the harms of AI as things stand, e.g. the privacy, environmental, data set bias problems:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0k3700zljjo
- Tried to read it, ended up glazing over after the first or second paragraph, so I'll fire off a hot take and call it a day:
  Artificial intelligence is a pseudoscience, and it should be treated as such.
  
  Every AI winter, the label AI becomes unwanted and people go with other terms (expert systems, machine learning, etc.)... and I've come around to thinking this is a good thing, as it forces people to specify what it is they actually mean, instead of using a nebulous label with many science fiction connotations that lumps together decent approaches and paradigms with complete garbage and everything in between.
  
  I'm gonna be polite, but your position is deeply sneerworthy; I don't really respect folks who don't read. The article has quite a few quotes from neuroscientist Anil Seth (not to be confused with AI booster Anil Dash) who says that consciousness can be explained via neuroscience as a sort of post-hoc rationalizing hallucination akin to the multiple-drafts model; his POV helps deflate the AI hype. Quote:
  There is a growing view among some thinkers that as AI becomes even more intelligent, the lights will suddenly turn on inside the machines and they will become conscious. Others, such as Prof Anil Seth who leads the Sussex University team, disagree, describing the view as "blindly optimistic and driven by human exceptionalism." … "We associate consciousness with intelligence and language because they go together in humans. But just because they go together in us, it doesn't mean they go together in general, for example in animals."
  At the end of the article, another quote explains that Seth is broadly aligned with us about the dangers:
  In just a few years, we may well be living in a world populated by humanoid robots and deepfakes that seem conscious, according to Prof Seth. He worries that we won't be able to resist believing that the AI has feelings and empathy, which could lead to new dangers. "It will mean that we trust these things more, share more data with them and be more open to persuasion." But the greater risk from the illusion of consciousness is a "moral corrosion", he says. "It will distort our moral priorities by making us devote more of our resources to caring for these systems at the expense of the real things in our lives" – meaning that we might have compassion for robots, but care less for other humans.
  A pseudoscience has an illusory object of study. For example, parapsychology studies non-existent energy fields outside the Standard Model, and criminology asserts that not only do minds exist but some minds are criminal and some are not. Robotics/cybernetics/artificial intelligence studies control loops and systems with feedback, which do actually exist; further, the study of robots directly leads to improved safety in workplaces where robots can crush employees, so it's a useful science even if it turns out to be ill-founded. I think that your complaint would be better directed at specific AGI position papers published by techbros, but that would require reading. Still, I'll try to salvage your position:
  Any field of study which presupposes that a mind is a discrete isolated event in spacetime is a pseudoscience. That is, fields oriented around neurology are scientific, but fields oriented around psychology are pseudoscientific. This position has no open evidence against it (because it's definitional!) and aligns with the expectations of Seth and others. It is compatible with definitions of mind given by Dennett and Hofstadter. It immediately forecloses the possibility that a computer can think or feel like humans; at best, maybe a computer could slowly poorly emulate a connectome.

Some quality sneers in Extropic's latest presentation about their thermodynamics hardware. My favorite part was the Founder's mission slide "e/acc maximizes the watts per civilization while Extropic maximizes intelligence per watt".
- is Extropic now claiming to have actually done anything?
  
  Apparently they are going to ship their development kits sometime later this year. He still sounds confusing AF to me and my BS indicator is going off all the time. He also makes incorrect statements (around 9 minutes in) such as
  Neural nets came from energy-based models
  which makes 0 sense historically. According to Wikipedia, EBMs were first introduced in 2003.
- I'm not going to watch more than a few seconds but I enjoyed how awkward Beff Jezos is coming across.

Hey look, it's this meme for the n-th time

Opening up the sack with your new favourite uwu news influencer giving a quick shout-out to our old pals, the NRx. Hoped that we wouldn’t get here, but here we are, regardless.
- I didn't know that uwu news influencer was a thing. Kind of a clash between style and topic there, but hey whatever gets the word out.
  
  I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.
  Same, and also I'm still trying to process that "uwu" breached out of furry spaces and became a widely understood term. (Although I'm not entirely sure what way it took, it's also possible that it breached out of anime-related communities. Maybe some day cyber-archeologists can figure this out.)
  
  I didn’t know that uwu news influencer was a thing.
  It's probably a thing where if you start thinking about it, it's always been around, but we've just never had the right vocabulary to describe it.
- I had so hoped that the rise of Trump (and his fall due to Biden) on the back of the more numerous and popular seeming Alt-Right had been the end of all this. Showing that NRx was a sort of weaker evolutionary dead end so to speak. But sadly no.

97 comments