4d ago

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Also, happy April Fool's in advance.)

106 comments

if you, like me, were wondering what the point of that 25 hour non-filibuster filibuster by Booker was, here’s one potential answer.
Booker held a filibuster that wasn't a filibuster - and he scheduled it to let him avoid attending his own committee's probe of his Big Tech pals. […] Oh and Booker and Dems provided unanimous consent to advance a Trump nominee right after Booker's speech.

Came across this fuckin disaster on Ye Olde LinkedIn by 'Caroline Jeanmaire at AI Governance at The Future Society'
"I've just reviewed what might be the most important AI forecast of the year: a meticulously researched scenario mapping potential paths to AGI by 2027. Authored by Daniel Kokotajlo (>lel) (OpenAI whistleblower), Scott Alexander (>LMAOU), Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean, it's a quantitatively rigorous analysis beginning with the emergence of true AI agents in mid-2025.
What makes this forecast exceptionally credible:
One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed
The report received feedback from ~100 AI experts (myself included) and earned endorsement from Yoshua Bengio
It makes concrete, testable predictions rather than vague statements that cannot be evaluated
The scenario details a transformation potentially more significant than the Industrial Revolution, compressed into just a few years. It maps specific pathways and decision points to help us make better choices when the time comes.
As the authors state: "It would be a grave mistake to dismiss this as mere hype."
For anyone working in AI policy, technical safety, corporate governance, or national security: I consider this essential reading for understanding how your current work connects to potentially transformative near-term developments."
Bruh what is the fuckin y axis on this bad boi?? christ on a bike, someone pull up that picture of the 10 trillion pound baby. Let's at least take a look inside for some of their deep quantitative reasoning...
....hmmmm....
O_O
The answer may surprise you!

New(ish) piece from Gary Marcus: AI has (sort of) passed the Turing Test; here’s why that hardly matters
Ended up reading it a couple times, thinking of turning my thoughts into a full-length post.

OpenNutrition -- ~~a dataset~~ an LLM that allows you to play "vibe nutritionist"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43569190
First response is good quality:
This is not a dataset. This is an insult to the very idea of data. This is the most anti-scientific post I have ever seen voted to the top of HN. Truth about the world is not derived from three LLMs stacked on top of each other in a trenchcoat.

Just had a video labeled "auto-dubbed" pop up in my YouTube feed for the first time. Not sure if it was chosen by the author or not. Too bad, it looks like a fascinating problem to see explained, but I don't think I'm going to trust an AI feature that I just saw for the first time to explain it. (And perhaps more crucially, I'm a bit afraid of what anime fans will have to say about this.)
- Given the apparent state of the art for autogenerated captions (and by extension the initial challenge of speech recognition) being firmly in the "good enough" range I would not trust the chain of speech recognition -> translation -> text-to-speech. That's a lot of room for errors to chain, multiply, and obscure themselves through GIGO even if the latter two steps did work as expected.
- That image needs a content warning for YouTube Face. Jesus H. Fuck.

Wow, I didn't expect AGI to start the armageddon so soon.
- Those tariff rates, and especially the targets, were 100% pooped out by grok.
- Made a tariff thread

Today on the orange site, an AI bro is trying to reason through why people think he's weird for not disclosing his politics to people he's trying to be friendly with. Previously, he published a short guide on how to talk about politics, which — again, very weird, no possible explanation for this — nobody has adopted. Don't worry, he's well-read:
So far I've only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
The thread is mostly centered around one or two pearl-clutching conservatives who don't want their beliefs examined:
I find it astonishing that anyone would ask, ["who did you vote for?"] … In my social circle, anyway, the taboo on this question is very strong.
To which the top reply is my choice sneer:
In my friend group it's clear as day: either you voted to kill and deport other people in the friend group or you didn't. Pretty obvious the group would like to know if you're secretly interested in their demise.
- So far I've only read Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, but can say it is an excellent place to start.
  beware the man of one book
  
  “Only if he’s read it 10000 times.” -Bruce Lee
  
  "Drink deep, or taste not the fanfiction spring"
- Wow, farriers are going crazy with these modern horseshoe designs!
  
  I love the implication that being an independent thinker means agreeing with both the majority and other independent thinkers.
  
  Finally, someone has solved the political compass. No-one will ever come up with a new political spectrum again. Soon we will have world peace
  
  Hi, I'm an unimtentional moderate centrist! I don't have an ideology, only views! My overton window is a peephole! Kamala is a far leftist! Trump is orange! People should stop treating politics like team sports and join the non team sports tribe like me! Political correctness gone mad! Let me tell you about Chesterton's fence! Everyone's sheeple except my flock! Say it with me: I'm an independent thinker!
  
  Did they try to add a bell curve in a place where it shouldn't be te last image? Im fascinated by how little sense it makes, and by how bad the adding a groupthink axis is.
  
  So "unintentional moderates" are those that both choose deliberately to believe in centrist political ideology and to participate in groupthink?

My University Keeps Sending Me Stupid Emails About AI, a continuing series:
From the email:
The debate will be chaired by Michael Pike. Speaking for the motion are Prof. Gregory O'Hare (TCD), Maeve Hynes, Prof. Gary Boyd and Chatgpt assisted by Student Curator Ruan McCabe, all UCD. Speaking against the motion are David Capener (UU), Lucy O'Connell, Peter Cody and Meabh O'Leary, all UCD.
- Artificial Intelligence is the future of climate resilient design in the same way that asian pseudo-medicinal ED treatments are the future of the white rhinoceros.
- Notwithstanding the subject matter, I feel like I've always gotten limited value from these Oxford-style university debates. KQED used to run a series called Intelligence Squared US that crammed it into an hour, and I shudder to think what that's become in the era of Trump and AI. It seems like a format that was developed to be the intellectual equivalent of intramural sports, complete with a form of scoring. But that contrivance renders it devoid of nuance, and also means it can be used to platform and launder ugly bullshit, since each side has to be strictly pro- or anti-whatever.
  Really, it strikes me as a forerunner of the false certainty and point-scoring inherent in Twitter-style short-form discourse. In some ways, the format was unconsciously pared down and plopped online, without any sort of inquiry into its weaknesses. I'd be interested to know if anyone feels any different.
  
  I have no knowledge or insight on the topic, but I used to get recommendations for "intelligence squared" videos on YouTube and I always thought it was a terrible, self-aggrandizing title for a series or event. Smart People Taking About Smart Things.

Elsevier doing some AI
"So, [Elsevier] added an AI question and answer to my article in Computer & Education.
The answers are wrong! They did not ask permission! The answers are WRONG!
How is this science?!"
- misread as Eliezer, semantic content unchanged

I would also like to complain that I have finally started getting AI summaries in Google, and I may have to switch to a different search engine. Neither wanted nor needed!
- The url manipulation trick doesnt work for you?
  E: this I mean, somebody even made a site for it. My own setup is weird and I have ancient strange habits so I just added it to my search bookmark.
  
  I should probably give it a go!

AI-Powered Wi-Fi 7 Versatile Outdoor/Indoor Mesh AP
we're at the "the washing machine without a dateclock is marked millenium-bug safe in its marketing brochures" level of stupid
(that might seem like a stupid comparison but it's one of the things I most viscerally remember seeing from that time (when I was still a youngin who was still largely years away from computertouching))

An AI faceswapper/nudifier's database got leaked thanks to its nonexistent security - unsurprisingly, its loaded with explicit images, including massive amounts child porn and almost certainly some revenge porn.
WIRED tried reaching out to the company behind the "imagery", but they nuked everything and closed their doors in response.

New video from Jessie Gender, providing one long sneer at gen-AI: How AI is Destroying our Dreams

My favorite meme message board on the internet keeps putting out bangers, but this one is extra good and relevant http://www.b3ta.com/board/11416629

NaNoWriMo? Na, No Mo'. Does this have anything to do with their bungled AI policy? Maybe, maybe not, but hey, the news article that I saw this announcement in thought that it was pertinent to mention.
- considering their endless history of scandal, good riddance
- Why does NaNoWriMo need a nonprofit anyway? What's next, No Nut November LLC?
  
  As funny as that is, I am sure that there are nonprofits that are aiming to stop fapping.
- Not dating your press releases on your own site is a choice. (Lot more places do this and it is driving me slowly mad) So, did they drop this yday? Some weird schrodingers april fools joke deflection attempt?
- I am fairly certain that their stupid AI stance at least played a role. I’m part of a largish writing community, where at least several hundred people did NaNo each year, a good part of them donated too. Last year, no one partook, instead we did our own internal thing.
  If this happened across other communities too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, they must have felt it financially.
  
  I'll believe it! I didn't want to make that claim since I had no evidence.
- Their dumb contraction should have doomed the project from the start...
  
  It is a CIA psyop to prevent revolutionary thought from arising in written media, in that it's a self-inflicted PIP that makes you feel inadequate in your creative writing ability. CIA funding (obviously funneled through NGOs via CIA front USAID) is how it's survived so long with such a stupid name. Of course, now that government spending on the CIA is going down, so is NaNoWriMo. All that's left is for it to be supplanted by some benevolent Chinese competitor that people will say steals your data, or something.
  /s /s /s

tip from a discord:
I've been doing some micro tasking to train LLM's the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it's all dried up, no tasks available. I can't help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.
- Please please please

SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:
- Your mistake, distant future ghost, was in developing RNA repair nanites without creating universal healthcare.

Gamers Nexus put out their April Fool's joke for this year, and became the first journalistic outlet to break Betteridge's law of headlines in the process.
- they should’ve had an overlay tracking counter in that opening montage, goddamn
  
  (just got to 4min:) “oh! it’s not just opening montage” ahahaha

Ed Zitron breaking out the anime references for April Fool's:
- OpenAI: Nah, I'd become profitable
  
  every so often I think of how Rat-brain is just bleach-dyed "the power of positive thinking" for nerds who don't get out in the world enough
- Finally Tim Pool will get what is wrong with AI
- Jesus, fine, I'll watch it already, God.

Prize for least funny, laziest AFJ goes to, no surprise, LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2NGKYt3xdQHwyfGbc/lesswrong-has-been-acquired-by-ea
- Additional "points" for the commenting system using local times in the user's browser, thereby timestamping further unfunny AFJ at 2 Apr in my timezone.
- Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

Derek Lowe casually points to Yarvin and Thiel in his writeup on how trumpists are destroying american science, in part 7 specifically. nrx have fully broke containment
- On the bright side, Derek Lowe has also escaped containment, which is nice
  
  has he? where?

I knew the HN reaction to Marine Le Pen being banned from being elected to public office would be unhinged, but weirdly I did not have "good, she's a woman and weak so now a strong man can lead RN to glorious victory" on my bingo card. More fool me, misogyny is always on the card.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43534140
- Misogyny is the free square, easy to forget
- There's a comment in there about how well it reflects on the British system that Bobby Sands was allowed to stand as an MP for Sinn Féin despite being an IRA member and a prisoner. This ignores that a) Sinn Féin policy was and is not to take seats in the British parliament, so he wouldn't have been voting or sitting on any committees, and b) Bobby Sands died in prison on hunger strike.
- Why yes, I'm sure 29 year old Jordan "El italiano 93" Bardella, who 10 years ago was uploading Call of Duty videos to youtube, is a much stronger candidate.

OK hear me out: they make a new season of Hell Girl, but she only gets people who use gen ai

A recent chapter of one of the official Touhou Project manga had a jab at crypto schemes. This isn't one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
- This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
  Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I'd be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.
  
  I didn't mean I expected it to be pro-crypto, just a little surprised it actually namedropped NFTs and blockchain at all.

Ran across an animation mocking AI art on Newgrounds recently - found it a pretty good watch.
- wow, surprisingly 00s in its feeling, nice

Anyone who uses gen AI is my opp, status report:
so far every restaurant that I've been to where I noticed AI slop as part of the decor has sucked. One of the ones local to me closed, hooray!
IDF: haha look we are Ghibli please send us more machine guns
a third thing
- jesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed
  
  Taking the "insult to life itself" to a whole another level.
- I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.
  
  That’s great. In a better world, all genAI users would become black goo-producing inhuman monsters to reflect their inner selves, but I suppose this is as much justice as we’ll get

Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm: he's still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:
Now, some of you may be wondering "Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!" Well, as it turns out, it wasn't AI - Shad quite literally stole someone's artwork and passed it off as AI.
- Ok. Full disclosure. When you said “Shad”, I thought you meant a different internet person who is shitty for creating morally degenerate art, so when I read this I thought that they had pivoted to AI and was like, I guess that tracks. But no, different shithead.
  Anyway. Bland and uninspired? All actual art is inspired, just by default. If it were truly bland, you wouldn’t be able to discern anything from it, which is just not the case. So Shad isn’t actually giving a valid opinion, he’s throwing out an insult, just so that he can elevate AI slop.
  Now AI slop, on the other hand, is uninspired and bland. It is uninspired because machines do not have the ability to be inspired. It is bland because it has no intention to be discerned, so contains nothing of substance.
  
  Not that you, under any circumstances, "have to hand it to" alleged convicted assaulter Shädman, but at least he drew his immature shock porn using his own mid artistic skills.
- Addendum: If you wanna support the artist, she has a Tumblr and a personal portfolio.

In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to "AI cancer tech funding in England". Baldur Bjarnason's given his commentary:
Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines
You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the "AI" stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would've gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble's burst.)

"Goonernomicon: Grummz | Part 1" just dropped! Posting this as a stub because it's only adjacent to the ordinary purview. A+++ chud hater content.
full disclo: I did not know who Grummz was before this
- Another good older vid mostly about Grummz, buy youtube essayist Shaun: Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage. A bit on the more twitch/video game side of things.
  
  Great vid. A good reminder that all the culture war people are real fucking stupid and I am right to disengage from scrapping with them.
- It must be nice not being so terminally online as myself, for reasons which at least partially escape my ken, I occasionally visit Twitter, and I am subscribed to it's dear leader, I get to enjoy a lot of the boosted nazi nonsense. (His account is followed by Elon)
  
  It must be nice not being so terminally online as myself
  Don't worry, I assure you that I am suffering in different ways

106 comments