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.)
>sam altman is greentexting in 2025
>and his profile is an AI-generated Ghibli picture, because Miyazaki is such an AI booster
it doesn’t look anything like him? not that he looks much like anything himself but come on
He’s an AI bro, having even a basic understanding of art is beyond him
can we get some Fs in the chat for out boy sammy a 🙏🙏
e: he thinks that he’s only been hated for the last 2.5 years lol
you don’t understand, sam cured cancer or whatever
This is not funny. My best friend died of whatever. If y’all didn’t hate saltman so much maybe he’d still be here with us.
“It’s not lupus. It’s never lupus. It’s whatever.”
Oh, is that what the orb was doing? I thought that was just a scam.
I hated Sam Altman before it was cool apparently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426
https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese
This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.
お前はもう死んでいる
Is Japanese really that strict
my Japanese uncle that works at nintendo says yes. If you write わ instead of は they make you 切腹 in front of all your friends
holy shitting fuck, just got the tip of the year in my email
Simplify Your Hiring with AI Video Interviews
Interview, vet, and hire thousands of job applicants through our AI-powered video interviewer in under 3 minutes & 95 languages.
“AI-Video Vetting That Actually Works”
it’s called kerplunk.com, a domain named after the sound of your balls disappearing forever
the market is gullible recruiters
founder is Jonathan Gallegos, his linkedin is pretty amazing
other three top execs don’t use their surnames on Kerplunk’s about page, one (Kyle Schutt) links to a linkedin that doesn’t exist
for those who know how Dallas TX works, this is an extremely typical Dallas business BS enterprise, it’s just this one is about AI not oil or Texas Instruments for once
This jerk had better have a second site with an AI that sits for job interviews in place of a human job seeker.
some video-shaped AI slop mysteriously appears in the place where marketing for Ark: Survival Evolved’s upcoming Aquatica DLC would otherwise be at GDC, to wide community backlash. Nathan Grayson reports on aftermath.site about how everyone who could be responsible for this decision is pointing fingers away from themselves
Craniometrix is hiring! (lol)
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/craniometrix/jobs/ugwcSrU-chief-of-staff
Hey, there’s a new government program to provide care for dementia patients. I should found a company to make myself a middleman for all those sweet Medicare bucks. All I need is a nice, friendly but smart sounding name. Oh, that’s it! I’ll call it Frenology!
That’ll look good in my portfolio next to my biotech startup with a personal touch YouGenics
Very fine people at YouGenics. They sponsor our karting team, the Race Scientists.
Nothing like attending a rally at Kurt’s Krazy Karts!
hmm, interesting. I hadn’t heard of these guys. their original step 1 seems to have been building a mobile game that would diagnose you with Alzheimer’s in 10 minutes, but I guess at some point someone told them that was stupid:
So far, the team has raised $6 million in seed funding for a HIPAA-compliant app that, according to Patel, can help identify Alzheimer’s disease — even years before symptoms appear — after just 10 minutes of gameplay on a cellphone. It’s not purely a tech offering. Patel says the results are given to an “actual physician” affiliated with Craniometrix who “reviews, verifies, and signs that diagnostic” and returns it to a patient.
small thread about these guys:
https://bsky.app/profile/scgriffith.bsky.social/post/3llepnsvtpk2g
tldr only new thing I saw is that as a teenager the founder annoyed “over 100” academics until one of them, a computer scientist, endorsed his research about a mobile game that diagnoses you with Alzheimer’s in five minutes
I missed the AI bit, but I wasn’t surprised.
Do YC, A16z and their ilk ever fund anything good, even by accident?
In other news, the Open Source Intiative’s publicly bristled against the EU’s attempt to regulate AI, to the point of weakening said attempts.
Tante, unsurprisingly, is not particularly impressed:
Thank you OSI. To protect the purity of your license – which I do not consider to be open source – you are working towards making it harder for regulators to enforce certain standards within the usage of so-called “AI” systems. Quick question: Who are you actually working for? (I know, it is corporations)
The whole Open Source/Free Software movement has run its course and has been very successful for business. But it feels like somewhere along the line we as normal human beings have been left behind.
You want my opinion, this is a major own-goal for the FOSS movement - sure, the OSI may have been technically correct where the EU’s demands conflicted with the Open Source Definition, but neutering EU regs like this means any harms caused by open-source AI will be done in FOSS’s name.
Considering FOSS’s complete failure to fight corporate encirclement of their shit, this isn’t particularly surprising.
The USA plans to migrate SSA’s code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”
SSN’s pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.
What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:
You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.
Bonus – Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i
60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler
Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of “young developer hybris” ever seen, or b) they don’t actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.
But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this: […]
Labrador retrievers ;_; You’re getting too good at this…
seems bad
There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.
Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.
When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, I’d appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the code’s behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.
Yeah I’m sure DOGE doesn’t appreciate that structured programming hasn’t always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their code’s structure to avoid calling it.
The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:
It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required
While I’ve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I’ve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).
there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense
Did my spider sense just tingle? Think the US might be in a bit of danger. Esp with the bit of “burn the boats” tendency this all seems to have.
To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it’s own lately) and I’ve never worked in government.
But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there’s anyone who isn’t convinced after reading all the headlines then there’s no convincing them.
details
Some news stories are still saying “could we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?”, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender people’s visas as “fraud”, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.
I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:
-
I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don’t think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn’t think I’d have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I’m worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.
-
My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria
-
My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.
-
My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.
* Since I’m taking the work visa route I’ll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.
As someone living in Switzerland for over 6 years, the labor laws aren’t exactly like in the rest of Europe and people are sometimes a bit too much on the freedumb side of things. Also weird german or (possibly less weird, I don’t speak it) french and high cost of living.
Then again, it’s not anywhere as bad as what’s happening in the us
-
Bwahahaha, as I said on bsky: let them do it, can’t wait to use it as a cautionary tale of why full rewrites are a terrible idea during freshman programming lectures
just remembered why I created an account here: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jobs/hwWsGdU-vibe-coder-ai-engineer become a vibe coder for a debt collection startup! but only if you’re willing to pull 15+ hour days for 80k a year
In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN’s put out an article titled “Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown”, whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed “The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes”.
You want my take on this development, I’m with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble’s finally nearing its end.
The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having “to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year”.
Turns out that they can only stack shit so high before it falls back to earth
Quick update on the CoreWeave affair: turns out they’re facing technical defaults on their Blackstone loans, which is gonna hurt their IPO a fair bit.
Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it
I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, I’m trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.
then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, there’s nothing to get excited about. these people don’t have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. it’s inevitable that to the extent they cohere they’re a cult: they’re a variety of sovereign citizen
I haven’t spent a lot of time sneering at transhumanism, but it always sounded like thinly veiled ableism to me.
considering how hard even the “good” ones are on eugenics, it’s not veiled
Only as a subset of the broader problem. What if, instead of creating societies in which everyone can live and prosper, we created people who can live and prosper in the late capitalist hell we’ve already created! And what if we embraced the obvious feedback loop that results and call the trillions of disposable wireheaded drones that we’ve created a utopia because of how high they’ll be able to push various meaningless numbers!
my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim.
(side note, gender affirming care resolved this. in my case HRT didn’t really help by itself, but facial feminization surgery immediately cured my dysphoria. also for some reason it cured my lower back pain)
(of course it wasn’t covered in any way, which represents exactly the sort of hostility to bodily agency transhumanists would prioritize over ten foot long electric current sensing dongs or whatever, if they were serious thinkers)
Wanting to escape the fact that we are beings of the flesh seems to be behind so much of the rationalist-reactionary impulse – a desire to one-up our mortal shells by eugenics, weird diets, ‘brain uploading’ and something like vampirism with the Bryan Johnson guy. It’s wonderful you found a way to embrace and express yourself instead! Yes, in a healthier relationship with our bodies – which is what we are – such changes would be considered part of general healthcare. It sometimes appears particularly extreme in the US from here from Europe at least, maybe a heritage of puritanical norms.
also cryonics and “enhanced games” as non-FDA testing ground. i’ve never seen anyone in more potent denial of their own mortality than Peter Thiel. behind the bastards four-parter on him dissects this
In my head transhumanism is this cool idea where I’d get to have a zoom function in my eye
But of course none of that could exist in our capitalist hellscape because of just all the reasons the ruling class would use it to opress the working class.
And then you find out what transhumanists actually advocate for and it’s just eugenics. Like without even a tiny bit of plausible deniability. They’re proud it’s eugenics.
@[email protected] yeah quite a few people have seen only the very top surface of transhumanism, and then sun it off with their own ideas and world building without engaging on a deeper level sometimes intentionally sometimes not
I, like many trans people I’d suspect just wanted out of this unsatisfying body and didn’t engage beyond that to any meaningful level
@V0ldek those transhumanist guys really think that it won’t be them to be weeded out by applied eugenics …
@timjclevenger @V0ldek @gerikson Exactly the kind of pollution I’m talking about not wanting.
@madargon @V0ldek @gerikson @techtakes Obviously you read the wrong cyberpunk. (Go root out Bruce Sterling’s short story “20 Evocations”, collected in Schismatrix Plus, and you’ll see an assassin having his arms and legs repossessed because he can’t kill enough people to keep up with the loan repayment schedule …)
it’s extremely established that it does
@froztbyte how to tell me you dont know anything about transhumanism without telling me you dont know anything about transhumanism:
@froztbyte I think @d4rkness is eliding a few steps that look clear to them, but they’re basically right: eugenics is about all transhumanists can do *today*, a lot of transhumanism is warmed-over Technocracy (the Musk family’s ideological wellspring), Technocracy was *def* on board with eugenics (and apartheid), so here we are: they aspire to more but eugenics is what they can do today so they’re doing it.
(I’ve been studying transhumanism since roughly 1990 and that’s my considered opinion.)
I’d agree there, and it might be that that’s what they meant, but as you say it still doesn’t leave the two things disconnected. didn’t see them heading in the direction of amusing debate, however!
(I’d wondered from your past writings how long you’d been looking into this shit, TIL the year!)
sorry, all the mental pretzels were taken up by the other poster a few days ago, you’ll have to contort your nonsense yourself. best avoid the history books though, they’ll make it really hard for you to achieve what you want
Here’s the link, so you can read Stack’s teardown without giving orange site traffic:
https://ewanmorrison.substack.com/p/the-tranhumanist-cult-test
Note I am not endorsing their writing - in fact I believe the vehemence of the reaction on HN is due to the author being seen as one of them.
I read through a couple of his fiction pieces and I think we can safely disregard him. Whatever insights he may have into technology and authoritarianism appear to be pretty badly corrupted by a predictable strain of antiwokism. It’s not offensive in anything I read - he’s not out here whining about not being allowed to use slurs - but he seems sufficiently invested in how authoritarians might use the concerns of marginalized people as a cudgel that he completely misses how in reality marginalized people are more useful to authoritarian structures as a target than a weapon.
In other news, Elon Musk’s personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:
Right now, the integration is limited to “Grok’s available as an optional chatbot”, but going by what I’ve seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.
New piece from Brian Merchant: Deconstructing the new American oligarchy
strange æons takes on hpmor :o
I like the video, but I’m a little bothered that she misattributes su3su2u1’s critique to Dan Luu, who makes it very clear he did not write it:
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1’s identity, I’ll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement.
liked the manic energy at the start (and lol at Strange not sharing his full history (like the extropian list stuff, and a much more), like not mentioning it is fine, the scene is set), and Chekovs fedora at the start.
all of the subculture YouTubers I watch are colliding with the weirdo cult I know way too much about and I hate it
oh no :(
poor strange she didn’t deserve that :(
Strange is a trooper and her sneer is worth transcribing. From about 22:00:
So let’s go! Upon saturating my brain with as much background information as I could, there was really nothing left to do but fucking read this thing, all six hundred thousand words of HPMOR, really the road of enlightenment that they promised it to be. After reading a few chapters, a realization that I found funny was, “Oh. Oh, this is definitely fanfiction. Everyone said [laughing and stuttering] everybody that said that this is basically a real novel is lying.” People lie on the Internet? No fucking way. It is telling that even the most charitable reviews, the most glowing worshipping reviews of this fanfiction call it “unfinished,” call it “a first draft.”
A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition of HPMOR at 26:30 or so:
It’s extremely tiring. I was surprised by how soul-sucking it was. It was unpleasant to force myself beyond the first fifty thousand words. It was physically painful to force myself to read beyond the first hundred thousand words of this – let me remind you – six-hundred-thousand-word epic, and I will admit that at that point I did succumb to skimming.
Her analysis is familiar. She recognized that Harry is a self-insert, that the out-loud game theory reads like Death Note parody, that chapters are only really related to each other in the sense that they were written sequentially, that HPMOR is more concerned with sounding smart than being smart, that HPMOR is yet another entry in a long line of monarchist apologies explaining why this new Napoleon won’t fool us again, and finally that it’s a bad read. 31:30 or so:
It’s absolutely no fucking fun. It’s just absolutely dry and joyless. It tastes like sand! I mean, maybe it’s Yudkowsky’s idea of fun; he spent five years writing the thing after all. But it just [struggles for words] reading this thing, it feels like chewing sand.
A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition
How.
Dropshippers trying to profit out of his popularity/infamy.
I can’t be bothered to look up the details (kinda in a fog of sleep deprivation right now to be honest), but I recall HPMOR pissing me off by getting the plot of Death Note wrong. Well, OK, first there was the obnoxious thing of making Death Note into a play that wizards go to see. It was yet another tedious example in Yud’s interminable series of using Nerd Culture™ wink-wink-nudge-nudges as a substitute for world-building. Worse than that, it was immersion-breaking: Yud throws the reader out of the story by prompting them to wonder, “Wait, is Death Note a manga in the Muggle world and a play in the wizarding one? Did Tsugumi Ohba secretly learn of wizard culture and rip off one of their stories?” And then Yud tried to put down Death Note and talk up his own story by saying that L did something illogical that L did not actually do in any version of Death Note that I’d seen.
And now I want potato chips.
Sorry Yuds, Death Note is a lot of fun and the best part is the übermensch wannabe’s hilariously undignified death. I guess it struck a nerve!
Life imitating “art” I suppose because There’s actually a Death Note musical.
🎶 If I had a Death Note / Ya da shinna shinna shinna shinna gamma gamma game / All day long, I’d namey namey names / If I had my own Death Note 🎶
Murderer on the Roof
Good video overall, despite some misattributions.
Biggest point I disagree with: “He could have started a cult, but he didn’t”
Now I get that there’s only so much Toxic exposure to Yud’s writings, but it’s missing a whole chunk of his persona/æsthetics. And ultimately I thing boils down to the earlier part that stange did notice (via echo of su3su2u1): “Oh Aren’t I so clever for manipulating you into thinking I’m not a cult leader, by warning you of the dangers of cult leaders.”
And I think even expect his followers to recognize the “subterfuge”.
While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:
https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/
