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.)
(found here:) O’Reilly is going to publish a book “Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming”
In the past, they have published some of my favourite computer/programming books… but right now, my respect for them is in free fall.
Alright, I looked up the author and now I want to forget about him immediately.
Just a standard story about a lawyer using GenAI and fucking up, but included for the nice list of services available
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/04/counsel-would-you-be-surprised.html
This is not by any means the first time ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Bard, or Copilot, or Claude, or Jasper, or Perplexity, or Steve, or Frodo, or El Braino Grande, or whatever stupid thing it is people are using, has embarrassed a lawyer by just completely making things up.
El Braino Grande is the name of my next
bandGenAI startupSteve
There’s no way someone called their product fucking Steve come on god jesus christ
Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.
frodo.ai on the other hand is currently domain parked. It could be yours for the low low price of $43,911
Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.
But is chickenjockey.ai domain parked
I bring you: this
they based their entire public support/response/community/social/everything program on that
for years
(I should be clear, they based “their” thing on the “not steve”… but, well…)
Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking “they can be very useful” (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:
Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd’s having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he’s getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.
Just gonna go ahead and make sure I fact check any scishow or crash course that the kid gets into a bit more aggressively now.
I’m sorry you had to learn this way. Most of us find out when SciShow says something that triggers the Gell-Mann effect. Green’s background is in biochemistry and environmental studies, and he is trained as a science communicator; outside of the narrow arenas of biology and pop science, he isn’t a reliable source. Crash Course is better than the curricula of e.g. Texas, Louisiana, or Florida (and that was the point!) but not better than university-level courses.
That Wikipedia article is impressively terrible. It cites an opinion column that couldn’t spell Sokal correctly, a right-wing culture-war rag (The Critic) and a screed by an investment manager complaining that John Oliver treated him unfairly on Last Week Tonight. It says that the “Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy” from 1982, which as I understand it violates Wikipedia’s policy.
By Crichton’s logic, we get to ignore Wikipedia now!
Yeah. The whole Gel-Mann effect always feels overstated to me. Similar to the “falsus in unus” doctrine Crichton mentions in his blog, the actual consensus appears to be that actually context does matter. Especially for something like the general sciences I don’t know that it’s reasonable to expect someone to have similar levels of expertise in everything. To be sure the kinds of errors people make matter; it looks like this is a case of insufficient skepticism and fact checking, so Hank is more credulous than I had thought. That’s not the same as everything he’s put out being nonsense, though.
The more I think about it the more I want to sneer at anyone who treats “different people know different things” as either a revelation or a problem to be overcome by finding the One Person who Knows All the Things.
Even setting aside the fact that Crichton coined the term in a climate-science-denial screed — which, frankly, we probably shouldn’t set aside — yeah, it’s just not good media literacy. A newspaper might run a superficial item about pure mathematics (on the occasion of the Abel Prize, say) and still do in-depth reporting about the US Supreme Court, for example. The causes that contribute to poor reporting will vary from subject to subject.
Remember the time a reporter called out Crichton for his shitty politics and Crichton wrote him into his next novel as a child rapist with a tiny penis? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.
Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.
Depends, he made an anti-GMO video on SciShow about a decade ago yet eventually walked it back. He seemed to be forgiven for that.
Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents
Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.
What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.
YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED.
You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!
Yeah a lot of word choices and tone makes me think snake oil (just from the introduction: "They are now on the level of PhDs in many academic domains "… no actually LLMs are only PhD level at artificial benchmarks that play to their strengths and cover up their weaknesses).
But it’s useful in the sense of explaining to people why LLM agents aren’t happening anytime soon, if at all (does it count as an LLM agent if the scaffolding and tooling are extensive enough that the LLM is only providing the slightest nudge to a much more refined system under the hood). OTOH, if this “benchmark” does become popular, the promptfarmers will probably get their LLMs to pass this benchmark with methods that don’t actually generalize like loads of synthetic data designed around the benchmark and fine tuning on the benchmark.
I came across this paper in a post on the Claude Plays Pokemon subreddit. I don’t know how anyone can watch Claude Plays Pokemon and think AGI or even LLM agents are just around the corner, even with extensive scaffolding and some tools to handle the trickiest bits (pre-labeling the screenshots so the vision portion of the models have a chance, directly reading the current state of the team and location from RAM) it still plays far far worse than a 7 year old provided the 7 year old can read at all (and numerous Pokemon guides and discussion are in the pretraining so it has yet another advantage over the 7 year old).
New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble’s aftermath
When measured for reliability, the State Bar told The Times, the combined scored multiple-choice questions from all sources — including AI — performed “above the psychometric target of 0.80.”
“I dunno why you guys are complaining, we measured our exam to be 80% accurate!”
Not the usual topic around here, but a scream into the void no less…
Andor season 1 was art.
Andor season 2 is just… Bad.
All the important people appear to have been replaced. It’s everything - music, direction, lighting, sets (why are we back to The Volume after S1 was so praised for its on-location sets?!), and the goddamn shit humor.
Here and there, a conversation shines through from (presumably) Gilroy’s original script, everything else is a farce, and that is me being nice.
The actors are still phenomenal.
But almost no scene seems to have PURPOSE. This show is now just bastardizing its own AESTHETICS.
What is curious though is that two days before release, the internet was FLOODED with glowing reviews of “one of the best seasons of television of all time”, “the darkest and most mature star wars has ever been”, “if you liked S1, you will love S2”. And now actual, post-release reviews are impossible to find.
Over on reddit, every even mildly critical comment is buried. Seems to me like concerted bot actions tbh, a lot of the glowing comments read like LLM as well.
Idk, maybe I’m the idiot for expecting more. But it hurts to go from a labor-of-love S1 which felt like an instruction manual for revolution, so real was what it had to say and critique, to S2 “pew pew, haha, look, we’re doing STAR WARS TM” shit that feels like Kenobi instead of Andor S1.
My notification pops-up today and I watched ep 1. I do not watch any recap nor any review.
I stopped halfway through and thought “Why did I hype for this again ?” Gotta need a rewatch of season 1 since I genuinely didn’t find anything appealing from that first episode.
We did a rewatch just in time. S1 is as phenomenal as ever. S2 as such a jarring contrast.
That being said, E3 was SLIGHTLY less shit. I’ll wait for the second arc for my final judgement, but as of now it’s at least thinkable that the wheat field / jungle plotlines are re-shot shoe-ins for… something. The Mon / Dedra plotlines have a very different feel to it. Certainly not S1, but far above the other plotlines.
I’m not filled with confidence though. Had a look on IMDb, and basically the entire crew was swapped out between seasons.
Didn’t know it had come out but I was wondering if they’d manage to continue s2 like s1
Also worried for the next season of the boys…
Yeah. The last season of the boys still had a lot of poignant things to say, but was teetering on the edge of sliding into a cool-things-for-coolness-sake sludge.
pic of tweet reply taken from r/ArtistHate. Reminded me of Saltman’s Oppenheimer tweet. Link to original tweet
image/tweet description
Original tweet, by @mark_k:
Forget “Black Mirror”, we need WHITE MIRROR
An optimistic sci-fi show about cool technology and hot it relates to society.
Attached to the original tweet are two images, side-to-side.
On the left/leading side is (presumably) a real promo poster for the newest black mirror season. It is an extreme close-up of the side of a person’s face; only one eye, part of the respective eyebrow, and a section of hair are visible. Their head is tilted ninety degrees upwards, with the one visible eye glazed over in a cloudy white. Attached to their temple is a circular device with a smiling face design, tilted 45 degrees to the left. Said device is a reference to the many neural interface devices seen throughout the series. The device itself is mostly shrouded in shadow, likely indicating the dark tone for which Black Mirror is known. Below the device are three lines of text: “Plug back in”/“A Netflix Series”/“Black Mirror”
On the right side is an LLM generated imitation of the first poster. It appears to be a woman’s 3/4 profile, looking up at 45 degrees. She is smiling, and her eyes are clear. A device is attached to her face, but not on her temple, instead it’s about halfway between her ear and the tip of her smile, roughly outside where her upper molars would be. The device is lit up and smiling, the smile aligned vertically. There are also three lines of text below the device, reading: “Stay connected”/“A Netflix Series”/“Black Mirror”
Reply to the tweet, by @realfuzzylegend:
I am always fascinated by how tech bros do not understand art. like at all. they don’t understand the purpose of creative expression.
Imagine the horrible product they would have created if they had actually followed up on the oppenheimer thing. A soulless vaguely wrong feeling pro technology movie created by altman and musk. The amount of people it would have driven away would have been big.
Facehuggers are good, actually
Just whole movie praising Peter Weyland and his legacy.
Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:
Vacant, glassy-eyed, plastic-skinned, stamped with a smiley face… “optimistic”
I mean, if the smiley were aligned properly, it would be a poster for a horror story about enforced happiness and mandatory beauty standards. (E.g., “Number 12 Looks Just Like You” from the famously subtle Twilight Zone.) With the smiley as it is, it’s just incompetent.
“The man in the glowing rectangle is Mark Kretschmann, a technology enthusiast who has grown out of touch with all but the most venal human emotions. Mark is a leveller, in that he wants to drag all people down to his. But as Mark is about to discover, there’s no way to engineer a prompt for a map out of… the Twilight Zone.”
I mean, it feels like there’s definitely something in the concept of a Where Is Everybody style of episode where Mark has to navigate a world where dead internet theory has hit the real world and all around him are bots badly imitating workers trying to serve bots badly imitating customers in order to please bots badly imitating managers so that bots badly imitating cops don’t drag them to robot jail
oppenheimer teaches all of us that even if you specifically learn arcane knowledge to devise a nazi-burning machine, you can still get fucked over by a nazi that chose to do office politics and propaganda instead
about cool technology and how it relates to society
My dude I’ve got bad news for you about what Black Mirror is about.
Why are all the stories about the torment nexus we’re constructing so depressing?
Hmm, hmm. This is a tricky one.
We have that already, it’s called ads.
need to see those proposed community notes
Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):
I tried this a couple of times and got a few “AI summary not available” replies
Ed: heh
The phrase “any pork in a swarm” is an idiom, likely meant to be interpreted figuratively. It’s not a literal reference to a swarm of bees or other animals containing pork. The most likely interpretation is that it is being used to describe a situation or group where someone is secretly taking advantage of resources, opportunities, or power for their own benefit, often in a way that is not transparent or ethical. It implies that individuals within a larger group are actively participating in corruption or exploitation.
Generative AI is experimental.
NOT THE (PORK-FILLED) BEES!
Now we know why dogs eat bees!
The link opened up another google search with the same query, tho without the AI summary.
image of a google search result description
Query: “a bear fries bacon meaning”
AI summary:
The phrase “a bear fries bacon” is a play on the saying “a cat dreams of fish” which is a whimsical way to express a craving. In this case, the “bear” and “bacon” are just random pairings. It’s not meant to be a literal description of a bear cooking bacon. It’s a fun, nonsensical phrase that people may use to express an unusual or unexpected thought or craving, according to Google Search.
It really aggressively tries to match it up to something with similar keywords and structure, which is kind of interesting in its own right. It pattern-matched every variant I could come up with for “when all you have is…” for example.
Honestly it’s kind of an interesting question and limitation for this kind of LLM. How should you respond when someone asks about an idiom neither of you know? The answer is really contextual. Sometimes it’s better to try and help them piece together what it means, other times it’s more important to acknowledge that this isn’t actually a common expression or to try and provide accurate sourcing. The LLM, of course, has none of that context and because the patterns it replicates don’t allow expressions of uncertainty or digressions it can’t actually do both.
You, a human can respond like that, a llm, esp a search one with the implied authority it has should admit it doesnt know things. It shouldn’t make up things, or use sensational clickbait headlines to make up a story.
Also on the BlueSky-o-tubes today, I saw this from Ketan Joshi:
Used [hugging face]'s new tool to multiply 2 five digit numbers
Chatbot: wrong answer, 0.3 watthours
Calc: right answer, 0.00000011 watthours (2.5 million times less energy)
Julien Delavande , an engineer at AI research firm Hugging Face , has developed a tool that shows in real time the power consumption of the chatbot generating
gnnnnnngh
this shit pisses me off so bad
there’s actually quantifiable shit you can use across vendors[0]. there’s even some software[1] you can just slap in place and get some good free easy numbers with! these things are real! and are usable!
“measure the power consumption of the chatbot generating”
I’m sorry you fucking what? just how exactly are you getting wattage out of openai? are you lovingly coaxing the model to lie to you about total flops spent?
[0] - intel’s def been better on this for a while but leaving that aside for now…
[1] - it’s very open source! (when I last looked there was no continual in-process sampling so you got hella at-observation sampling problems; but, y’know, can be dealt with)
Show HN: AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770953
@o7___o7 @BlueMonday1984 hey cool they made something that absolutely nobody wants or will ever use
A service that gives a bullshit engine unsupervised access to the irreversible-transaction machine? What could possibly go wrong?
Otoh, this does open up the potential for a headline like ‘Chatgpt sanctioned for using stolen cryptocurrency assets.’
ChatGPT finally achieved profitability due to unintended money laundering at unprecedented scale.
exploitation-offshorer “Nick Huber” (@sweatystartup) finds that the leopards will, in fact, also eat his face. but still takes it as a fine opportunity to pitch his exploitation:
(I guess at least his account name is directionally accurate? indicates willingness to induce sweatshops…)
tweet 1
I was pro tariffs.
Until about 30 of our clients at Somewhere dot com cancelled searches over the past three weeks. Hiring freezes all over the place.
Hit me in the pocket book already.
REMOVE TARIFFS.
tweet 2
By the way:
If you want to hire folks internationally for 80% less than US employees, check out somewhere[.]com or send me a DM for a discount.
Is that the tomato scale guy?
looks to be! thanks, I’d seen that before and remember the incident, but I’m beyond abysmal at names
(this is a problem to solve, I know)
This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:
Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:
- Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
- Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
- The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.
If I think of more I’ll post them.
LMFAO, best known for “Party Rock Anthem”, is actually a failed leftist yodaist sect, standing for the warning “Leopards, my face, ate off”
took me 3 tries to read “yodaist” correctly (brain kept going s/d/g/ which, well…)
I thought of the old sneerclub/ssc poster (def not a regular on the former, while a former regular on the latter) yodatsracist
Personally id not use disinformation as a tool. It is what got us into this mess, and you are also helping the actual goal of the flooding the zone with misinformation tactic. People stop believing in things.
Ok, that’s fair enough. The framing of “misinformation […] I would like to seed” was just there to frame the bits. I don’t really want these bits to take off.
Allright, let me put my ‘warnings for young demonologists’ guidebook to the side. ;).
@swlabr @Soyweiser too late
for the betterment of muddled waters, I suggest a secondary meaning for
opus dei- a WIP codec that the xiph group hasn’t really released yet, because they’re not sure it fully enough mutes maga voices
Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
I opened the site for it and browsed a bit, my first thought being something like “christ, the worst of glamper festivals”, shortly after followed by “god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED”
then, bottom of the “music & performances” page:
Europe’s answer to TED
gnnnnnnngh
god this like is like if the worst of burning man fucked TED
Burning man portrayed famously by Anna Gunn
Putting philosophy talks at a music festival is one of those ideas you come up with to try and sound smart, cool, and edgy, but as a high schooler who has never done drugs nor been to a live show before.
Anyway I went through the lineup summaries on the wikipedia page, two notes:
- No Jay Shetty! His particular brand of grift philosophy and thinly veiled clout chasing would fit in exactly at this sort of event. Then again, this festival might actually be beneath him, as he hangs out with hollywood a-listers.
- The lineup noticeably hits its turning point into a nosedive when they start hosting Pinker in 2018.
‘nightmare blunt roration’ as people say. See the greyzone is also present.
as in the tankies? i don’t see blumenthal in there
ah okay, it’s been a while since they were relevant
grayzone, the: low quality disinformation source constantly praising putin and assad while downplaying their warcrimes and amplifying conspiracy theories favourable to these two. not to be confused with greyzone, a wagner group associated telegram channel
Ah my bad, i always mess the spelling of gray/grey up.
weirder thing is that blumenthal (american) uses british spelling, and russians (where british english was taught more commonly when it was relevant for them? i think?) used american spelling
I’m glad that messing it up is at least common.
Search engines also must wonder why I’m so interested in couches and coaches because I know which word I mean, I don’t always know how it is spelled. There prob is a nice mnemonic involving Vance and Waltz I could think off that would help me with that problem however.
The only one I’ve met is Carlo Rovelli, at the APS March Meeting in 2019. We work in adjacent topics, but I don’t travel much. I know people who know him better, and I haven’t heard stories of him being horrible, for whatever that’s worth. He does come across as a bit of an eager self-promoter. I can easily imagine him accepting an invitation on the “a gig’s a gig” principle.
I did read one of Carlo’s pop sci books back in the day, was a nice read. Iirc he’s like one of the dudes all in on loop quantum gravity. Bet you’d know more about this than I do 😅
“Philosophy & Music” are indeed two categories of things that share one letter between them.
Feel very happy to recognise only Corbyn and Penrose by name, no idea what any of them are doing there.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
Corbyn is, like, famously bad at recognising bad faith fascist signalling, so it doesn’t not make sense.
I mean, I know who Penrose was, but from the context I assume he’s probably acutely suffering from Nobel Disease and I have zero idea what he’s been up to outside of physics.
He is busy being 93 fucking years old, lol
And isn’t Corbyn just a boring lefty UK politician? Does he have like a philosophy background or something?
They probably couldn’t get Bernie.
If Penrose followed his trajectory from 30 years ago, he is now a radical anti AGI person but because he thinks human minds work on quantum effects.
Cursed bizzaro bonaroo
I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as “gold and Bitcoin”.
Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn’t true and it’s just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.
Quick check suggests that Bitcoin is indeed up over the last couple of days, but at time of posting is down YTD. Any dumb money going into Bitcoin to hedge against USD chicanery is replacing the money that came out of it in response to the overall economic disaster still in progress, so I wouldn’t exactly call it a “flight to safety” as much as a “morons returning their still-on-fire hands to the hot stove”
Ed: also all the usual disclaimers about liquidity, stable coins, manipulation, etc. apply just as strongly as they do for any other discussion of the Bitcoin spot price.
Isnt the money in volume in bitcoin quite low reportedly? I figure the exchanges can track that, but not sure if they release that data, which should show if this is real at all
@David Gerard could probably throw the actual numbers and sources at us to back it up. I don’t really have the background to put the numbers in context and have largely trusted his and others’ reporting on the subject, but my understanding is that especially if you consider the volume of actual USD liquidity rather than trusting Tether and other stablecoins to actually be backed then it’s truly dire. Even if you take the numbers at face value, however, I don’t think there’s nearly enough depth in the order book to absorb a meaningful amount of sell pressure at current prices.
when stocks are suffering Bitcoin is seen as the automatic money machine cause allegedly line can only go up. It doesn’t produce or rely on supply chain logistics and is immune to trade wars so it quickly gets popularity again. And there’s no such thing as a former coiner because once there’s a hint of potential bag holders arriving then they activate like fucking sleeper agents ready to push the moon-prop
@yellowcake @mountainriver All it needs is a bigger fool.
@yellowcake @mountainriver, the cause of the money machine? Are you sure about that?
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