Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th December 2025 - awful.systems

Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.

just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that's nothing, tell me when all of them are gone

Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?

Most insane part about this is after he assaulted the treasurer(?) of his foundation trying to siphon funds for an apparent terror act, the naive chuckle fucks still went and said “we dont think his violent tendencies are an indication he might do something violent”

Like idk maybe update on the fact he just sent one of his own to the hospital??

If rationalists could benefit from just one piece of advice, it would be: actions speak louder than words. Right now, I don't think they understand that, given their penchant for 10k word blog posts.

One non-AI example of this is the most expensive fireworks show in history, I mean, the SpaceX Starship program. So far, they have had 11 or 12 test flights (I don't care to count the exact number by this point), and not a single one of them has delivered anything into orbit. Fans generally tend to cling on to a few parlor tricks like the "chopstick" stuff. They seem to have forgotten that their goal was to land people on the moon. This goal had already been accomplished over 50 years ago with the 11th flight of the Apollo program.

I saw this coming from their very first Starship test flight. They destroyed the launchpad as soon as the rocket lifted off, with massive chunks of concrete flying hundreds of feet into the air. The rocket itself lost control and exploded 4 minutes later. But by far the most damning part was when the camera cut to the SpaceX employees wildly cheering. Later on there were countless spin articles about how this test flight was successful because they collected so much data.

I chose to believe the evidence in front of my eyes over the talking points about how SpaceX was decades ahead of everyone else, SpaceX is a leader in cheap reusable spacecraft, iterative development is great, etc. Now, I choose to look at the actions of the AI companies, and I can easily see that they do not have any ethics. Meanwhile, the rationalists are hypnotized by the Anthropic critihype blog posts about how their AI is dangerous.

This would be worrying if there was any risk at all that the stuff Anthropic is pumping out is an existential threat to humanity. There isn't so this is just rats learning how the world works outside the blog bubble.

If TCP/IP stack had feelings, it would have a great reason to feel insulted.

They somehow misused every word in that sentence.

Chicken penne is now rivaling spaghetti Bolognese as a core layer of pasta infrastructure.

please hate this article headline with me

I'm right there with you

the article headline: "Chatbots are now rivaling social networks as a core layer of internet infrastructure"

Counterpoint: "vibe coding" is rotting internet infrastructure from the inside, AI scrapers are destroying the commons through large-scale theft, chatbots are drowning everything else through nonstop lying

The real infrastructure is the friends we made along the way

From the replies

I wonder what prompted it to switch to Elon being worth less than the average human while simultaneously saying it’d vaporize millions if it could prolonged his life in a different sub-thread

It's odd to me that people still expect any consistency from chatbots. These bots can and will give different answers to the same verbatim question. Am I just too online if I have involuntarily encountered enough AI output to know this?

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I'm shocked.

Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you've done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

Does this mean calibre's use case is a digital equivalent of a shelf of books you never read?

Now I'm even more skeptical of the programmers (and managers) who endorse LLMs.

Considering the sorry state of the software industry, plus said industry's adamant refusal to learn from its mistakes, I think society should actively avoid starting or implementing new software, if not actively cut back on software usage when possible, until the industry improves or collapses.

That's probably an extreme position to take, but IT as it stands is a serious liability - one that AI's set to make so much worse.

The documentation for "Turbo mode" for Google Antigravity:

Turbo: Always auto-execute terminal commands (except those in a configurable Deny list)

No warning. No paragraph telling the user why it might be a good idea. No discussion on the long history of malformed scripts leading to data loss. No discussion on the risk for injection attacks. It's not even named similarly to dangerous modes in other software (like "force" or "yolo" or "danger")

Just a cool marketing name that makes users want to turn it on. Heck if I'm using some software and I see any button called "turbo" I'm pressing that.

It's hard not to give the user a hard time when they write:

Bro, I didn’t know I needed a seatbelt for AI.

But really they're up against a big corporation that wants to make LLMs seem amazing and safe and autonomous. One hand feeds the user the message that LLMs will do all their work for them. While the other hand tells the user "well in our small print somewhere we used the phrase 'Gemini can make mistakes' so why did you enable turbo mode??"

yeah as I posted on mastodong.soc, it continues to make me boggle that people think these fucking ridiculous autoplag liarsynth machines are any good

but it is very fucking funny to watch them FAFO

After the bubble collapses, I believe there is going to be a rule of thumb for whatever tiny niche use cases LLMs might have: "Never let an LLM have any decision-making power." At most, LLMs will serve as a heuristic function for an algorithm that actually works.

Unlike the railroads of the First Gilded Age, I don't think GenAI will have many long term viable use cases. The problem is that it has two characteristics that do not go well together: unreliability and expense. Generally, it's not worth spending lots of money on a task where you don't need reliability.

The sheer expense of GenAI has been subsidized by the massive amounts of money thrown at it by tech CEOs and venture capital. People do not realize how much hundreds of billions of dollars is. On a more concrete scale, people only see the fun little chat box when they open ChatGPT, and they do not see the millions of dollars worth of hardware needed to even run a single instance of ChatGPT. The unreliability of GenAI is much harder to hide completely, but it has been masked by some of the most aggressive marketing in history towards an audience that has already drunk the tech hype Kool-Aid. Who else would look at a tool that deletes their entire hard drive and still ever consider using it again?

The unreliability is not really solvable (after hundreds of billions of dollars of trying), but the expense can be reduced at the cost of making the model even less reliable. I expect the true "use cases" to be mainly spam, and perhaps students cheating on homework.

I know it is a bit of elitism/priviledge on my part. But if you don't know about the existence of google translate(*), perhaps you shouldn't be doing vibe coding like this.

*: this of course, could have been a LLM based vibe translation error.

E: And I guess my theme this week is translations.

E2: another edit unworthy of a full post, noticed on mobile have not checked on pc yet, but anybody else notice that in the the searchbar is prefilled with some question about AI? And I dont think that is included in the url. Is that search prefilling ai advertising? Did the subreddit do that? Reddit? Did I make a mistake? Edit: Not showing up on my pc, but that uses old reddit and adblockers. EditnrNaN: Did more digging, I see the search thing on new reddit on my browser, but it is the AI generated 'related answers' on the sidebar (the thing I complained about in the past, how bad those AI generated questions and answers are). So that is a mystery solved.

Yes i know the kid in the omelas hole gets tortured each time i use the woe engine to generate an email. Is that bad?

Is there any search engine that isn't pushing an "AI mode" of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to "opt out" like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

I have found it strange how many people will say "I asked chatgpt" with the same normalcy as "googling" was.

Sadly web search, and the web in general, have enshittified so much that asking ChatGPT can be a much more reliable and quicker way to find information. I don't excuse it for anything that you could easily find on wikipedia, but it's useful for queries such as "what's the name of that free indie game from the 00s that was just a boss rush no you fucking idiot not any of this shit it was a game maker thing with retro pixel style or whatever ugh" where web search is utterly useless. It's a frustrating situation, because of course in an ideal world chatbots don't exist and information on the web is not drowned in a sea of predatory bullshit, reliable web indexes and directories exist and you can easily ask other people on non-predatory platforms. In the meanwhile I don't want to blame the average (non-tech-evangelist, non-responsibility-having) user for being funnelled into this crap. At worst they're victims like all of us.

Oh yeah and the game's Banana Nababa by the way.

At work, i watched my boss google something, see the "ai overview" and then say "who knows if this is right", and then read it and then close the tab.

It made me think about how this is how like a rumor or something happens. Even in a good case, they read the text with some scepticism but then 2 days later they forgot where they heard it and so they say they think whatever it was is right.

"they call this “training” but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots"

You can train animals, you can train a plant, you can train your hair. So it's not really anthropomorphising.

that being a hung banner (rather than wall-mount or so) borders on being a tacit acknowledgement that they know their shit is unpopular and would get vandalised in a fucking second if it were easy (or easier!) to get to

even then, I suspect that banner will not stay unscathed for long

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Always thought she should have stuck to acting.

(I know, Hayek just always reminds me of how people put his quotes over Hayeks image, and people just get really mad at her, and not at him. Always wonder if people would have been just as mad if it was Friedrichs image and not Salmas due to the sexism aspect).

Cory Doctorow has plugged this on his blog, which is usually a good signal for me.

You'd think that they'd eventually run out of ways to say "fuck you, got mine" but here we are I guess. I'm going to guess that they're not subject to the same kinds of environmental regulations or whatever that an actual power plant would be because it's not connected to the grid?

The follow-up is also funny:

::: spoiler image description quote post from same poster: "Grok fixed it for me:"

quoted post: "People were hating on Gemini's floor plan, so I asked Grok to make it more practical."

An AI slop picture of a house floorplan at the top melding into a perspective drawing of a room interior below. :::

Help, I asked AI to design my bathroom and it came with this, does anyone know where I can find that wallpaper?

I don't see the problem, that looks like a typical McMansion to me.

Also, it's nice the AI included a dedicated room for snorting cocaine (powder room).

Guy does a terrible job explaining literally anything. Why, when trying to explain all the SA based drama, does he choose to create an analogy where the former employee is heavily implied to have murdered his wife?

S/o to cinnaverses for mixing it up in there.

I really enjoy the bingo card. Let's see when I can find an opportunity to use it...

bring back rich people rolling their own submarines and getting crushed to death in the bathyal zone

all things aside, is current ghostty any good, or still an audiophile consolephile-ware?

i'm generally reluctant to try something which reeks of intensive self-promotion, but few months ago i decided to finally see what's the hype about, and, well, it's a terminal emulator.

wezterm does much more, and with a much cleaner ui, and it's programmable, and the author doesn't remind me that hashicorp is a thing that exists.

I took psychic damage by scrolling up and seeing promptsimon posting a real doozie:

I have been enjoying hitting refresh on https://fuckthisurl/froztbyte-scrubbed-it-intentionally throughout today and watching the number grow - it's nice to see a clear example of people donating to a new non-profit open source project.

"oooh! look at the vanity project go! weeeee, isn't having a famous face attached to it fun?" with exactly no reflection on the fucking daunting state of open source funding in multiple other domains and projects

enter hashimoto. cringe intensifies

ghosTTy is the username of a schizoposter on Something Awful who only shows up to post bitcoin price charts and get mocked into oblivion. I wonder if there's any connection?

i hereby propose a new metric for a popular publication, the epstein number (Ē), denoting the number of authors who took flights to epstein's rape island. generally, credible publications should have Ē=0. this one, after a very quick look, has Ē=2, and also hosts sabine hossenfelder.

Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” overlooks the tectonic technological shift that’s reshaping society.

“Please stop talking about the bubble bursting, I haven’t handed off my bag yet”

it's some copium of tremendous potency to misidentify public sentiment (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/) for movement (ignore the "AI experts" these are people surveyed at a certain machine learning conference, really could be substituted by 1000 clones of Sutskever)

We are three paragraphs and one subheading down before we hit an Ayn Rand quote. This clearly bodes well.

A couple paragraphs later we're ignoring both the obvious philosophical discussion about creativity and the more immediate argument about why this technology is being forced on us so aggressively. As much as I'd love to rant about this I got distracted by the next bit talking about how micro expressions will let LLMs decode emotions and whatever. I'd love to know this guy's thoughts on that AI-powered phrenologist features a couple weeks ago.

(thinks) groxxing

the base use for LLMs is gonna be hypertargetted advertising, malware, political propaganda etc

well the base case for LLMs is that, right now

the privacy nerds won't know what hit them

The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.

I try to avoid having to even see the outputs of these fucking systems, but you just made me realize that there's going to be more than a few of them that will "leak" (read: preferentially deliver, by way of training focus) the kinks of its particular owner. I mean it's already happening for the textual replies on twitter, soothing felon's ever so bruised ego. the chance of it not Shipping beyond that is pretty damn zero :|

god I hate all of this

i am pretty sure i am shredding the Resonant Computing Manifesto for Monday

and of course Anil Dash signed it

Anybody writing a manifesto is already a bit of a red flag.

Nice rant in the entry on OSNews about this... love the phrase "MLMs for unimpressive white males".

I can see it making sense, what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM, and probably CPU-integrated flash, to maximize speed. The business of RAM and flash drive upgrades will become a very large but shrinking retrocomputing niche probably served by small Chinese fabs.

Bleugh, I’ve been using crucial ram and flash for a hell of a long time, and they’ve always been high quality and reasonably priced. I dislike having to find new manufacturers who don’t suck, especially as the answer seems to be increasingly “lol, there are no such companies”.

Thanks to the ongoing situation in the us, it doesn’t look like the ai bubble is going to pop soon, but I can definitely see it causing more damage like this before the event.

This seems like a bit of a desperation pivot while the bubble money is still flowing. I've heard they struggled a bit with shipping PCIE CXL memory that's capable of memory sharing between rackmount nodes, so they're probably taking everything from the consumer channel and cramming it into the enterprise channel in a bid to be the low-cost/high-volume provider. I would expect them to eventually come limping back into the consumer market to much marketing fanfare, alongside trying to set a higher price floor there, similar to Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza.

I like this. Kinda wish it was either 10x longer and explained things a bit, or 10x shorter and was more shitposty. Still, good

Based on my cursory perusal of CCRU lore, it all seems to boil down to amphetamine-induced mania and hallucinations

So, yeah, probably

That's one Lemurian time demon for each side of the Time Cube.

Iirc A Dirty Joke.

It is important to note that the reviews were detected as being ai generated by an ai tool.

This is a marketing puff piece.

I mean, I expect that loads of the submissions are by slop extruders… under the circumstances, how could they not be? But until someone does the legwork of checking this, it’s just another magic-eight-ball-says-maybe, dressed up as science.

The basilisk now eats its own tail.

Dang that judge was angry.

Here's docket #170: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.384571/gov.uscourts.mied.384571.170.0.pdf -- the complaining about not being allowed to use AI is on page 14 and 16 (it's pretty awful reading I almost gave up before reaching that point)

a pro se litigant should not be threatened with per-citation fines before any violation.

lmao

The long expected collapse of the rationalists out of their flagging cult into ordinary religion and conspiracy theory continues apace.

Hat tip to the person who wants to try and include DMT and other hallucinogens and psychedelics. How many of these experiences are gonna be tagged "Machine Elves" by the time anyone starts asking wtf we're doing here?

good lord, with the generic vibe-coded tech website as well, I hate these people

I associate Clausewitz (and especially John Boyd) references more with a Palantir / Stratfor / Booz / LE-MIC-consulting class compared to your typical bay area YC techbro in the US, and a very different crowd over in AU / NZ where grognards probably outnumber the actual military. LWers never bring up Clausewitz either but love Sun Tzu. But as far as software strategy posts go, I'd much rather read a Clausewitz tie-in than, say, Mythical Man Month or Agile anything.

How many aliens can damce on the head of a pin?

Please keep these people away from my precious nerd-subjects for the love of god.

DoD tries to cover up development of U2 and F117, and entire religion grows up from this

Ah, prophet-maxxing. 'they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds'

The first and oldest reason I stay sane is that I am an author, and above tropes. Going mad in the face of the oncoming end of the world is a trope.

This guy wrote this (note I don't think there is anything wrong with looking like a nerd (I mean I have a mirror somewhere, so I don't want to be a hypocrite on this), but looking like one and saying you are above tropes is something, there is also HPMOR)

Handshake meme of Yud and Rorschach praising Harry S Truman

From the comments:

I got Claude to read this text and explain the proposed solution to me

Once you start down the Claude path, forever will it dominate your destiny....

hey crazy idea, what if we made a vehicle that moves across the habitable surface of the crust instead

@froztbyte

Don't forget he made a prototype of a gaming helmet with shotgun shells aimed to kill the wearer.

I’m thinking nydus worms from SC2 or the GLA tunnel system in C&C generals.

article is informing me that it isn't X - it's Y

It's the McMindfulness guy, nice to see that he is still kicking around.

In Empire of AI, she shows how CEO Sam Altman cloaks monopoly ambitions in humanitarian language—his soft-spoken, monkish image (gosh, little Sammy even practices mindfulness!)

lol ofc he does

It's even way too long a read and full of footnotes, as is tradition!

Heck it's even long enough that I just came across the second flashcard break, and I'm 1/4th of the way through part 1...

I am not familiar with Case or her work, but based on my shallow research, she’s part of the cohort of internet stuff-communicators including people like Vi Hart or the Oatmeal etc. Not casting aspersions on anyone here, but I’d be interested to know who amongst them have revealed their chud nature and who has remained pristine (…for now).

I was annoyed at the start lumping in ai ethics with all the ai doom stuff, and then basically stopped reading.

Do think it is interesting that Miles is part of a collaborative yt tech channel and they recently released an ai slop episode. (Which I have not watched yet either, things need to slow down for a bit please).

tl;dr: AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI...

Just one thing that caught my attention:

AI code review helps developers. We ... found that 72.6% of developers who use Copilot code review said it improved their effectiveness.

Only 72.6%? So why the heck are the other almost 30% of devs using it? For funsies? They don't say.

You'd think due to self selection effects most people who wouldn't find using Copilot effective wouldn't use it.

The only way that number makes sense to me is if people were force to use Copilot and... no, wait, that checks out.

I clicked as I was curious as to what markers of AI use would appear. I immediately realised the problem: if it is written with AI then I wouldn’t want to read it, and thus wouldn’t be able to tell. Luckily the author’s profile cops to being “AI assisted”, which could mean a lot of things that just boil down to “slop forward”.

pity it is slop, I'd enjoy a good ESR dunk

saw it via jonny who did do some notes

oh I just saw this is almost a month old! still funny tho

(and I've been busy af afkspace)

So, I'm not an expert study-reader or anything, but it looks like they took some questions from the MMLU, modified it in some unspecified way and put it into 3 categories (AI, human, AI-human), and after accounting for skill, determined that people with higher theory of mind had a slightly better outcome than people with lower theory of mind. They determined this based on what the people being tested wrote to the AI, but what they wrote isn't in the study.
What they didn't do is state that people with higher theory of mind are more likely to use AI or anything like that. The study also doesn't mention empathy at all, though I guess it could be inferred.

Not that any of that actually matters because how they determined how much "theory of mind" each person had was to ask Gemini 2.5 and GPT-4o.