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. Also, happy Pride :3)
OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT
congrats, that’s awesome news!
Congrats! :D
Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!
Congrats!
Godspeed my friend. What was the turnaround, if I may ask? How long was the interview process etc?
Over the weekend if I’m understanding right. Just one interview. Its at a distillery lol.
Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, “will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol”. They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don’t want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,
“Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I’m using to handle the”, I swear to Gods I’m not making this up, “MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…”. Desperate emphases mine.
And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.
I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was “haha yeah, mathlab is hard”.
I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.
A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife
B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.
I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I’m sure, and then it won’t actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you’re using R or something, if you’re doing genetics on Excel at all you’re probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.
Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…
@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *they’d* use ChatGPT nowadays then you’d be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/
mathrix laboratory
MATHLAB CODE
Oof ow my heart
Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?
“Microsoft Excel…would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell.”
Also, happy Pride :3
Yes, happy pride month everyone!
I’ve decided that this year I’m going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows… wonder if anyone will notice.
Hell yeah!
Seems there’s a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I’ve been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.
I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.
Thank you.
image transcription
Zach Weinersmith skeeted: Movie idea:
Effective Altruism Star Wars, in which it’s OK to be a Sith as long as the majority of your earnings go through vetted charities.
Plod skeeted: And when the Death Star explodes it’s due to fraudulant accounting
tiedoton skeeted: Building endless swaths of droids that do nothing but continuously experience bliss to offset any suffering caused by the Empire.
Not sure if that would be done by the Empire or the Rebellion
Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND
(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)
The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like
Calls Al coding assistants too risky
Has never tested Al-generated code
Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets
Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?
I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the people who think it’s impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.
Perfection
Engineering/Adoptive: Adds eval tests to flag hallucinations
Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.
Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI
Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed
Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like
I wonder where Edsger Dijkstra would fall in this table.
0,0 position, to the left of the makeupless guy above the engineering bit.
I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I’m not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.
It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It’s a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase “don’t be evil”, they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.
I’ve just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.
Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!
That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.
For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.
https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/
There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.
As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.
There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.
It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.
Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.
AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.
reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with “sorry, we really aren’t equipped to help you”
stop it, get some help.pdf
damn we’ve got cyberpsychos before gta 6
This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining
https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068
David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.
Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.
L. O. L.
hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won’t join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:
I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer
I bet you’re right on the money.
Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it’s so good, which tickled me
fly.io is closed source, of course he’s not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,
Special bootlicking points:
Source: xcancel.com
@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog
@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn’t let me.
For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg
(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)
This almost reads like tptacek doesn’t understand why lucidity’s piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.
I’d have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it’s a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I’m just a vibe coding Youtuber.
Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:
Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again
Why the bash hate?
Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire
Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)
speaking as someone who uses bash all the time, it’s a fully equipped programming language and you absolutely should not use it as one because it’s made of footbullets. Use Python. For extra sysadmin flavour, make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash.
make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash
Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of
os.system,subprocess.runand/orsubprocess.callthat could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey
shellcheck.It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?
That’s a whole lotta words to say “I’m a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers.”
he’s not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.
I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).
fwiw, there’s a telling detail about ptaček’s attitude to people who he doesn’t see as his equals or peers: today is a second day in a row when he’s not able to use proper pronouns with regard to hazel weakly (who dared to criticise his article), despite being corrected by more than one person.
it’s either malice, or the principal engineer at fly dot io is not able to remember a single fact despite being informed about it three times.
Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:
https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz
(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)
OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.
OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.
Bashing my own head with a rock might seem harmful to my brain, but it also leaves minerals lodged in my skull. Minerals I can then sell to buy a bigger rock.
First we mine, then we craft hey does anyoune else smell burnt toast?
Sounds like they should nationalize OpenAI.
lol jfc
This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there’s at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.
https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
I’m gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek’s screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.
The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.
Has anyone heard of Boom Supersonic? Supposedly the company is making a new SST that is supposed to be able to go supersonic without the sonic boom hitting the ground by flying at or above 50,000 feet. They did a demo flight using a a plane that doesn’t use the engine tech that the prospective finished plane will have nor does it resemble the prospective airframe design, so it seems like they went fast to prove fast plane is fast I guess?
I just now heard about here. Reading about it on Wikipedia… they had a mathematical model that said their design shouldn’t generate a sonic boom audible from ground level, but it was possible their mathematical model wasn’t completely correct, so building a 1/3 scale prototype (apparently) validated their model? It’s possible their model won’t be right about their prospective design, but if it was right about the 1/3 scale then that is good evidence their model will be right? idk,
I’m not seeing much that is sneerable here, it seems kind of neat. Surely they wouldn’t spend the money on the 1/3 scale prototype unless they actually needed the data (as opposed to it being a marketing ploy or worse yet a ploy for more VC funds)… surely they wouldn’t?iirc about the Concorde (one of only two supersonic passenger planes), it isn’t so much that supersonic passenger planes aren’t technologically viable, its more a question of economics (with some additional issues with noise pollution and other environmental issues). Limits on their flight path because of the sonic booms was one of the problems with the Concorde, so at least they won’t have that problem. And as to the other questions… Boom Supersonic’s webpage directly addresses these questions, but not in any detail, but at least they address them…
Looking for some more skeptical sources… this website seems interesting: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-boom-successfully-build-a-supersonic . They point out some big problems with Boom’s approach. Boom is designing both its own engine and it’s own plane, and the costs are likely to run into the limits of their VC funding even assuming nothing goes wrong. And even if they get a working plane and engine, the safety, cost, and reliability needed for a viable supersonic passenger plane might not be met. And… XB-1 didn’t actually reach Mach 2.2 and was retired after only a few flight. Maybe it was a desperate ploy for more VC funding? Or maybe it had some unannounced issues? Okay… I’m seeing why this is potentially sneerable. There is a decent chance they entirely fail to deliver a plane with the VC funding they have, and even if they get that far it is likely to fail as a commercially viable passenger plane. Still, there is some possibility they deliver something… so eh, wait and see?
It doesn’t seem like a viable thing. Is there really enough demand for a supersonic commercial flight with the seating capacity of a regional? The company claims that major airlines have already committed to purchasing the yet-to-exist plane, which begs the question “how committed?” I would highly doubt that without a demonstrator specifically for the passenger version, that any airline would put down any amount of money. I have been known to underestimate the foolishness of leadership, so maybe there is an inked deal as opposed to a handshake for x number of planes, though only at y price.
In concept, supersonic aircraft are cool. Going fast is really neat. I think those are the feelings Boom is banking on, which is sad because I feel that their airliner is vaporware.
Yeah, the commitment might be only a token amount of money as a deposit or maybe even less than that. A sufficiently reliable and cost effective (which will include fuel costs and maintenance cost) supersonic passenger plane doesn’t seem impossible in principle? Maybe cryptocurrency, NFTs, LLMs, and other crap like Theranos have given me low standards on startups: at the very least, Boom is attempting to make something that is in principle possible (for within an OOM of their requested funding) and not useless or criminal in the case that it actually works and would solve a real (if niche) need. I wouldn’t be that surprised if they eventually produce a passenger plane… a decade from now, well over the originally planned budget target, that is too costly to fuel and maintain for all but the most niche clientele.
Boom is designing both its own engine
Which is absolutely insane. The knowledge to make efficient, modern jet engines is heavily concentrated (for example, India has been trying to build their own jet engines to reduce dependency on the US and Russia and have only managed to get to 1970s-era technology) and I have no expectation for Boom to be able to match that by any means.
Possibly OT, but fits in with the “finance ruins everything” motif we’ve got going here:
My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this
Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.
Ya’ll seein this shit?
there’s no anime avatar, how do we know it’s really Elon?
I’ve been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never. Donald Trump isn’t going to screw around, and, ironically, DOGE has shown you don’t need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government, so I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink’s government contracts. On the returning end… Elon doesn’t have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don’t think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I’m somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.
Would be best if he treated Musk like how they treated the four icc judges. Sanction Musk. (I heard this has basically destroyed the ICCs ability to do things btw)
I’ve been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never
as I said elsewhere (and have from early around the doge announcement): he was never going to last because orange was never going to felon lead, and felon was never going to settle. and everyone who brought him in did so knowing that, but that was fine for them because they were using him as a useful idiot, as a politically useful wrecking ball who they could dump all blame on later and wash their hands of
DOGE has shown you don’t need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government
this tracks with historical fascist power seizures, although ofc updated in the detail of “let felon run wild, then just accept the outcome and use it as a new precedent”. he provided them with a test run of finding just how egregious they could go without pushback (and thus where they need to machinate more)
I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink’s government contracts. On the returning end… Elon doesn’t have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don’t think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I’m somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.
overall, same yeah. felon’s long appeared to be comfortable socking for outside influences, so maybe he might go knocking for some more russian/chinese/indian/emirati/whatever war funding, but maaaybe not find some soon enough to prop up his whole house of cards?
(besides, the entire ai craze is begging in the same corners, which maybe is a good thing in this light)
Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years …
Elon Musk thinking he’s going to make it to 90 and more is even more delusional than the Mars stuff.
he’s going on an all-psyker diet
I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy
I don’t think it’sa stretch to see the independence of spacex classified as a national security risk and have it nationalised (though not called that, because that sounds too socialist) and have associated people such as elon declared traitors. Shouldn’t even be that difficult these days, seeing how he’s trashed his own reputation, and it’ll be good to encourage the other plutocrats to stay in line.
Night of the long knives is in the playbook, after all
@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she’s the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she’s a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)
It isn’t clear that anyone in trump’s government has ever paused to consider than any of their plans might have downsides.
there are ways to make it work https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-23/russia-central-banker-wanted-out-over-ukraine-but-putin-said-no
If only!
Elon’s mother was born in Regina.
If Canada became the 51st State, that makes Elon the son of an American born citizen and thus eligible for the Presidency.
If Alberta and Saskatchewan leave Canada (and join the States), this also occurs.
deleted by creator
