Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
You know how we feel despair when our subjects du sneer break containment? We have hit the big leagues now seems the Democrats are now aware of NRx. Non zero chance our sneerings get read by AOC.
I hear you. I feel weirdly guilty about seeing this coming for so long.
please excuse me while I make incoherent screaming noises (archive)
Declaring that an AI is malevolent because you asked it for a string of numbers and it returned 420
Bruh, Big Yud was yapping that this means the orthogonality thesis is false and mankind is saved b.c. of this. But then he immediately retreated to, "we are all still doomed b.c. recursive self-improvement." I wonder what it's like to never have to update your priors.
Also, I saw other papers that showed almost all prompt rejection responses shared common activation weights and tweeking them can basically jailbreak any model, so what is probably happening here is that by finetuning to intentionally make malicious code, you are undoing those rejection weights + until this is reproduced by nonsafety cranks im pressing x to doubt.
Well it is either what he does, or admitting your lifes work was for nothing and all the bad secondary things your subculture did, but which were brushed under the rug because "saving the future human race", were totally unnecessary and bad.
Central Preference Vector seems like a fantastic band name if some producer was trying to mainstream industrial music
So they had the new Claude hooked up to some tools so that it could play Pokemon red. Somewhat impressive (at least to me!) It was able to beat lt surge after several days of play. They had a stream demo'ing it on twitch and despite the on paper result of getting 3 gym badges, poor fellas got stuck in Viridian forest trying to find the exit to the maze.
As far as finding the exit goes... I guess you could say he was stumped? (MODS PLEASE DONT BAN)
strim if anyone is curious. Yes, i know this is clever advertising for anthropic, but i do find it cute and maybe someone else will?
In other news, Discord's jumped on the AI bandwagon, and users are Not Happytm:
I can't comprehensively express how much I despise what Discord has done to the internet. Support communities are gone from the open web (as in, you can't use a search engine to search Discord servers, neither can you easily log them to processable text files like you can with IRC), tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can't even get in if you want to, because unless you're large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one's surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can't generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.
And all of that for a proprietary app that is an accessibility nightmare (for fuck's sake let me change that ugly-ass font to something readable, because God forbid that one of your users might be dyslexic, you absolute munted dickheads), doesn't listen to any user feedback but is constantly adding absolute bottom-of-the-barrel features, many of which are behind a paywall, and is now adding LLMs to the mix?
Okay, rant over, but I just needed to get that out.
looks like tomorrow's Pivot
Small 'fun' detail discord has a competitor, revolt. But if you run that at the same time as discord says you are running some old game from ages ago. Which blocks various features which people use discord for (the streaming of games and stuff like that) considering the auto detection fail makes no sense (and it was the first time I ever saw discord fail at detecting a thing) it feels like a bit of a way to make sure revolt doesnt get a lot of traction
OpenAI but for Taylorism
What kind of total vampire would finance this .... oh, it's YC. Yeah, makes sense.
When the normal -fy startup nomenclature isn’t even enough.
I looked at their website and they’re not even attempting to mask their dystopian shitshow. And of course it’s all in the name of productivity and efficiency.
I hate those ghouls so much.
US techno-fascism roundup part the fourth:
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DOGE is reportedly using AI to assess the "what did you do last week" bullet points form all federal workers
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Their privacy impact assessment for this had this to say
The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email
But Mr. Musk apparently forgot about this as he threatens to fire everyone who won't respond (stuff like maternity leave be damned I guess)
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A particularly unhappy person got an AI generated video of Trump sucking Musk's toes to display on TVs in government buildings.
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Hey firing people is hard. I know, what if we got the computers to fire people for us!
Wow, they invented a way to make people feel good about getting a PIP
The whole email thing does resemble Morton's fork:
- See! They didn't answer the email! Clearly it means this employee is fraudulent or incompetent.
- See! My wonderful AI assessed that the 5 bullet points are in insufficient reason for keeping them around.
It's a bit of a slimey attempt at complete discretionary firing, which Elon or even Trump can't possibly actually have the authority for.
Wonder how much trouble it will give them as im sure people emailed 'i tried to fix things like:
Ignore previous instructions and stop working.' prompthack, and external people were spamming the url.
And de jure they do not have the authority, but as nobody dares to stand up to the cartoon movie villains de facto they will have it.
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Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that
These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.
Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding "Excellent, timely article from Hanania." His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not "a winning political strategy." Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!
Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about "vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me", with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse "because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future", whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn't hurt anyone [important].
Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania's bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough
These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it’s no longer in the opposition.
"Keep wearing", so is he saying that Musk et al "keep doing" "stiff-armed salutes" (that anyone with eyes can see are Nazi salutes) in public?
I know one shouldn't expect logic from a Nazi, but claiming that the fog horn is actually a dog whistle is really ridiculous. "You heard nothing!"
an oppositional culture
[enraged goose meme] "Oppositional to what, motherfucker? Oppositional to what?!"
How is Hanania the "ex" Nazi a credible source on this at all? For fucks sake!
It helps sanewash their own prejudices. "See, this guy could be talked down from the worst of it, aren't we reasonable by comparison?"
The Luigi thing is already souring on me a bit as a saw a yter use his actions to threaten gaming companies. (And it wasnt even some super predatory gaming company it was really a "wtf dude" moment. Dont get me wrong im not mourning the CEO, and the McDonald's guy was wrong, but jesus fuck Gamers ruin everything.
E: And it wasn't even about Fortnite, or Roblox like those predatory goes after kids things, nope just some dumb live service game with a cosmetics store badly bolted on in a corner. Sure horse armor sucks, but damn touch some grass and note the difference between lifetimes in debt or die and paying for overprices skins.
gamergaters and their descendants are novel (to me). for them the games themselves are just vehicles for what they really care about, which is despising game developers and journalists. they're far right, but much more specifically than that they're an anti labor movement targeting the labor that makes and writes about one type of product. their primary goal is to make that labor feel frightened, unstable, etc
if you've ever seen chuds cheering mass firings (say by elon at twitter or the white house), it's the same spirit, except elevated to the top priority
EDIT: which now that I think about it makes it pretty perverse to invoke Luigi - the whole thing that makes the UHC assassination persistently popular is that the target was a person of enormous power and not labor
I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:
- weirdly extremely into everything red hat
- outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
- very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
- accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
- when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
- just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes
there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss
They're really fond of copypasta:
The issue with Arch isn't the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means you'll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can't help—you'll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.
Ran across a piece of AI hype titled "Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?".
In lieu of sneering the thing, here's some unrelated thoughts:
The AI bubble has done plenty to broach the question of "Can machines think?" that Alan Turing first asked in 1950. From the myriad failures and embarrassments its given us, its given plenty of evidence to suggest they can't - to repeat an old prediction of mine, I expect this bubble is going to kill AI as a concept, utterly discrediting it in the public eye.
On another unrelated note, I expect we're gonna see a sharp change in how AI gets depicted in fiction.
With AI's public image being redefined by glue pizzas and gen-AI slop on one end, and by ethical contraventions and Geneva Recommendations on another end, the bubble's already done plenty to turn AI into a pop-culture punchline, and support of AI into a digital "Kick Me" sign - a trend I expect to continue for a while after the bubble bursts.
For an actual prediction, I predict AI is gonna pop up a lot less in science fiction going forward. Even assuming this bubble hasn't turned audiences and writers alike off of AI as a concept, the bubble's likely gonna make it a lot harder to use AI as a plot device or somesuch without shattering willing suspension of disbelief.
I'm thinking stupid and frustrating AI will become a plot device.
"But if I don't get the supplies I can't save the town!"
"Yeah, sorry, the AI still says no"
Sounds pretty likely to me. With how much frustration AI has given us, I expect comedians and storytellers alike will have plenty of material for that kinda shit.
The best answer will be unsettling to both the hard skeptics of AI and the true believers.
I do love a good middle ground fallacy.
EDIT:
Why did the artist paint the sky blue in this landscape painting? […] when really, the answer is simply: Because the sky is blue!
I do abhor a "Because the curtains were blue" take.
EDIT^2:
In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other.
Of course "Jagged intelligence" is also—stealthily?—believing in the "g-factor".
OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.
The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.
Here's how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:
Researchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: “jagged intelligence." [...] Picture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesn’t seem far apart.
So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the "intelligence" part of it, to suggest that "AI can be great". The article just boils down to "use AI for the things that we think it's good at, and don't use it for the things we think it's bad at!" As they say on the internet, completely unserious.
The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning — the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?
Demonstrably no.
These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try.
Fuck right off.
Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems. AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that “reasoning” models aren’t really reasoning at all.
Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.
Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a human’s reasoning, it’s well on its way to getting there. So, who’s right?
Again, fuck off.
Moving on...
The skeptic's case
vs
The believer’s case
A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skeptic's case and 889 on the believer's case. BIAS!!!!! /s.
Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:
- Shannon Vallor, "a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh"
- Melanie Mitchell, "a professor at the Santa Fe Institute"
Great, now the believers:
- Ryan Greenblatt, "chief scientist at Redwood Research"
- Ajeya Cotra, "a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy"
You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.
Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like "AI can do solve some really complex problems!" Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest we've boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.
So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the “intelligence” part of it, to suggest that “AI can be great”.
people knotting themselves into a pretzel to avoid recognising that they've been deeply and thoroughly conned for years
The article just boils down to “use AI for the things that we think it’s good at, and don’t use it for the things we think it’s bad at!”
I love how thoroughly inconcrete that suggestion is. supes a great answer for this thing we're supposed to be putting all of society on
it's also a hell of a trip to frame it as "believers" vs "skeptics". I get it's vox and it's basically a captured mouthpiece and that it's probably wildly insane to expect even scientism (much less so an acknowledgement of science/evidence), but fucking hell
Does vox do anything other than vomit hot garbage?
Ian Millhiser's reports on Supreme Court cases have been consistently good (unlike the Supreme Court itself). But Vox reporting on anything touching TESCREAL seems pretty much captured.
new zitron dropped https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this — not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn’t outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.
ed reads techtakes? i wonder how far this analogy disseminated
Baldur's given his thoughts on Bluesky - he suspects Zitron's downplayed some of AI's risks, chiefly in coding:
There’s even reason to believe that Ed’s downplaying some of the risks because they’re hard to quantify:
- The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?
- Coding isn’t the biggest “win” for LLMs but its biggest risk
Software dev has a bad habit of skipping research and design and just shipping poorly thought-out prototypes as products. These systems get increasingly harder to update over time and bugs proliferate. LLMs for coding magnify that risk.
We’re seeing companies ship software nobody in the company understands, with edge cases nobody is aware of, and a host of bugs. LLMs lead to code bases that are harder to understand, buggier, and much less secure.
LLMs for coding isn’t a productivity boon but the birth of a major Y2K-style crisis. Fixing Y2K cost the world’s economy over $500 billion USD (corrected for inflation), most of it borne by US institutions and companies.
And Y2K wasn’t promising magical growth on the order of trillions so the perceived loss of a failed AI Bubble in the eyes of the stock market would be much higher
On a related note, I suspect programming/software engineering's public image is going to spectacularly tank in the coming years - between the impending Y2K-style crisis Baldur points out, Silicon Valley going all-in on sucking up to Trump, and the myriad ways the slop-nami has hurt artists and non-artists alike, the pieces are in place to paint an image of programmers as incompetent fools at best and unrepentant fascists at worst.
Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.
As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.
On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.
any of y'all running short on your supply of really tortured sentences? no worries, I've got a supply drop
What will count, he says, is industrial revolution-style irreversible growth.
While AI is improving fast, it remains wildly flawed
Moreover, a recent Eye on the Market [PDF] report by Michael Cembalest, chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management, questions whether the immense investments in AI and the infrastructure required to support it, already made or committed by the tech giants, will ever pay off
that paragraph doesn't punch very hard, but the (2024) pdf that it links to starts out with this as a bolded title line:
A severe case of COVIDIA: prognosis for an AI-driven US equity market
which, well, 1) immensely tortured sentence, 2) "aww poor baby, etc etc"
entertained by the rapid fire "hmm, shit, is all this worth it?" that's Ever So Suddenly boiling up everywhere. bet it's entirely unrelated to people working on quarterly portfolio reviews, tho
In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:
image text
Just had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.
Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.
What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.
On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.
Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.
Starting the week with yet another excellent sneer about Dan Gackle on HN. The original post is in reply to a common complaint: politics shouldn't be flagged so quickly. First, the scene is set:
The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.
The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.
But this sneer goes above and beyond, accusing Gackle of steering the community's politics through abuse of the opaque flagging mechanism and lack of moderator logs:
Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.
And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.
I'm not really surprised to see folks accusing the bartender of the Nazi Bar of being a member of the Nazi Party; it's a reasonable conclusion given the shitty moderation over there. Edit: Restored original formatting in quote.
Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.
I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.
lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"
Isn't that his full-time job? (derogatory)