Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I’ve never heard of that’s gone fash. “GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??” “PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don’t exist?” open source people, are you ok?
Mercifully image-free article from rolling stone on how easy it is becoming to get grok to generate porn, including deepfakes of real people and bestiality.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-musk-grok-hardcore-porn-1235442715
Includes a relevant quote from musk back in august:
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1954791048934244394
I still remember 6th/7th grade debates with classmates about VHS vs Betamax!
VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉
I guess that’s a product “moat” of sorts.
https://www.theverge.com/news/797540/dc-comics-jim-lee-no-generative-ai-pledge - for context, Jim Lee was the 90s XMen artist and Image Comics cofounder.
Didn’t the lead tech clown Linus from Linus Tech Tips publicly invest a bit of money in the company? Anyone know how to get this onto that shitty talk show of his so he can go mask of live?
I’d wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?
It’s not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system … like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?
Because Omarchy is an open endorsement of fascism disguised as a Linux distro - like the takeovers of NixOS and RubyGems, its success would help to further entrench fascists in the FOSS ecosystem.
The answer probably looks a lot like “here’s how to install omarchy on your laptop in 14 easy steps! And 88 great apps you can install afterwards!”
deleted by creator
The thread’s made it onto r/framework - there’s a lot of fash coming out the woodwork and getting downvoted, plus a lot of people deeply disappointed in Framework’s Fash Turn.
Also found another thread on the forums, with multiple people jumping ship from using them: https://community.frame.work/t/withdrawing-all-financial-association-from-framework-until-further-changes/76005
Ahh, I just zapped my original comment, because irelephant had posted the same link plus a bit more earlier.
Anyway, it is nice to see that there is pushback on this elsewhere. I doubt it will be enough to change framework’s mind substantially… they’re obviously happy with their sponsorship and it was clearly a very deliberate choice, but they need to be reminded from as many directions as possible that it was a shitty choice by shitty people.
Replacement Antinatalism. By Émile P. Torres. Having babies is unethical, having AI babies otoh is the way forward.
Turns out the abyss is even deeper than we thought. Give it a look.
haven’t finished reading this so no sneers yet, but others may also be interested in this piece on the history of thiel’s antichrist obsession
the opener probably won’t surprise you
Are there any takedowns of Girard out there?
what are some of the all time most ludicrous and/or bigoted lesswrong posts? i am starting a podcast where my cohost and i show each other shockingly weird or bigoted texts and discuss them. mostly we’re doing historical ones but rationalist stuff is fair game
If you want a little hit of an unfair one, might want to look into the some of the weird manosphere guys who joined LW early on. Like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini.
E: Ah doesnt seem he wrote much: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurini (or it got purged). Amazingly, he is actually not the worst: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPCKiEd2G8H3kkdnN/the-dark-arts-preamble?commentId=3nrQddAAYnZzegPt5
I think Yud’s “ethical solution” to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I’ve ever seen on LW.
(The whole thread is a doozy.)
this post is so mentally damaging that seeing it here two years ago is one of my most vivid sneer memories
So much psychic damage (and also /r/brandnewsentence material) in that thread…
The problem is solved by pairing those who wish to live longer at personal cost to themselves with virtuous pedophiles.
edit: That’s not the alluded Yud’s solution btw
edit edit:
I still wouldn’t be all that tempted in his place, if pedophilia is merely a positive description. There’s little advantage in not being a pedophile.
Man rationalists from back when they didn’t worry about being youtube-ready were something else.
The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.
For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/04/18/human-biodiversity-part-7-lesswrong/
Scott’s Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don’t forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.
I will! @odiumsymposium on bsky in the meantime
jwz ditching basecamp - decent discussion. tbh, I ctrl-f’d for the Jira sneers. Also includes a GitLab sneer that was not on my radar.
I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/
And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.
did this motherfucker just try to say “scaling comedy”? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here’s something to point at.
Scaling comedy, it is when you pick bigger and bigger objects for ‘your mom’ jokes.
Future Elephant Graveyard target?
Found a pretty good sneer against vibe coding: The Programmer Identity Crisis
This author touches on a point that dovetails with my thinking:
Dijkstra, in “On the foolishness of ‘natural language programming’,” wrote, rather poignantly: “We have to challenge the assumptions that natural languages would simplify work.” And: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulation, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”
I think it likely that these tools will not be judged, in the long term, by the ambitions and hopes of the AGI cultists and hype-men, but by comparison to the many other attempts at natural-language programming in English. Smalltalk, Visual Basic, I even want to throw in AppleScript, as simple and threadbare as it was. How are all of these doing now?
AppleScript has been complemented or perhaps superseded by at least two more graphically-oriented attempts at system automation targeted at non-technical users. One could argue that its falloff came from an imperfect marriage with the message-passing/service-oriented architecture based on Objective-C and inherited from NeXT in Mac OS X, a system design which is itself now vestigial. The comparison with LLM coding assistants is imperfect, as they seem to be typically targeted at the more granular level of the class or the method, rather than explicit high-level hooks in an application. A better comparison here would be the last year or so worth of “AI agents,” but, uhm, ahh…
Smalltalk seemed to have a pretty big boom in the late 80s/early 90s, but tapered off rapidly after that. I like the more modern implementation of Pharo well enough, but it strives to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, with a downright balk-worthy amount of packages listed when you open up the class browser. On top of that, a few weeks ago I noticed someone in their Discord telling a newbie that current good practice is to file out your code every once in a while and then start over with a fresh image, as various background processes in stock images typically become unstable over time. This is orthogonal to the natural-language-like design, but it is a stumbling block to the sense of “liveness” and interactivity that is similarly a big hook for LLM assistance. Furthermore, as far as I know, they still don’t have a stable answer for system-level parallelism in the VM. All I’ve seen is a rather awkward technique for spinning off tree-shaken child VMs if there’s some method you want to run in parallel. You’ve got to really love Smalltalk to want to work past that shortcoming!
VB.NET I can’t really speak to, except that it seems Microsoft now considers it a stable language with little if any new feature development. The original implementation never seemed to have a good rep for maintainability, and the very idea of native Forms seems out of fashion compared to JavaScript web-app frontends. And the land of JavaScript, of course, seems to be the most fertile and uncontested kingdom of LLM coding assistance. I’m genuinely interested to hear more experiences with modern VB, as it strikes me as the last great corporate-sanctioned push for non-technical users to build their own apps, and thus the most worthy comparison.
All this is to say that each of these previous attempts at natural-language programming haven’t bit-rotted too hard, implementations are still available and you can probably salvage a legacy project with some effort. But each of them have been sidelined by industry over time. Not necessarily because of Dijkstra’s objection to the ambition of approaching natural language, although I don’t think we can totally discount that as a factor. But other technical or platform restrictions certainly hamstrung each of them. And LLM tools are still mostly API-based SaaS, which always has the glaring technical vulnerability of the provider running out of money. Yes, people will still pursue local models, but the bubble bursting could do a lot more harm to this approach than proponents anticipate.
an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.
Yeah like convincing people to start to count at zero, causing billions in damages by off by one errors. Dijkstaaaa!!!
(Im just making a joke/doing a bit here, I dont blame him for off by one errors, counting at zero isnt even the big one I think (more logic errors). Just always find it funny that he wrote a article on why we should start to count at zero. Sorry I dont have any useful input).
E: perhaps some input. Not sure if coding in natural language is ever really going to be viable in serious projects, as at the end of the day it needs to be converted to machine code. And there will be mismatch. Same like writing the law like code. There also is a mismatch there.
A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.
The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.
After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.
If you’re the kind of motherfucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of motherfucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.
Not that anyone should be in charge of that shitshow of a company, but hey!
Bonus sneer from the comment section:
Sam Altman in Feb 2015: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”
Sam Altman in Dec 2015, after co-founding OpenAI: “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Sam Altman 4 days ago, on his personal blog: “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation.”
After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.
I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.
Got another bonus sneer from the comments as well:
Polluting human knowledge with crap, making internet useless, taking away jobs from creative people by making things that look creative enough. Governments are complicit, politicians are bribed. Like that suck-up youtuber [Two Minute Papers] repeats, “What a time to be alive” right ?
(Sidenote: It massively fucking sucks how Two Minute Papers drank the AI Kool-Aid, I used to love that channel.)
I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.
No, it’s absolutely justified and I agree with basically everything he says in the video (esp. the title, there is really no reason for technology like this to exist in the hand of the public, or anyone really, there’s zero upsides to it). It’s just funny to me because the video is just so different from his usual calm stuff.
But honestly, good for him and (hopefully) his community too.
after playing silksong and hades ii, i am now pretty confident that game devs sniff their farts more than any other artists
“the player can’t pause during the boss because he controls time” fuck offfffff
(hades ii is mostly excellent, though, and silksong is a diamond encased in dogshit — there is a wonderful game in there, if you can find it)
You probably already know this, but there’s a relatively cheap upgrade you can buy at the camp in Hades II that disables this mechanic. Forgot what it’s called, but it’s something like “Allows you to use time magic against the boss”.
I bought it before I ever paused against the boss. I discovered this mechanic doing Vow of Rivals :(
That sounds really neat for all of 30 seconds before your cat knocks over their water bowl mid-fight and needs your immediate attention, thus reminding you why pause functions exist at all.
I could never live in a dyson sphere. I cant stand how they stop charging after six months.
They sell adapters so you can attach dewalt batteries to your computronium fantasy.
My mom has a Dyson
sphereBall. It sucks, which is actually good in this case because that’s what it’s supposed to do.You can get a mod to insert Weyland-Yutani cells, after a short incubation period you’ll see a real burst of improvement.
