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.)
New premium column from Ed Zitron, digging into OpenAI and Oracle’s deal.
The Oracle deal seemed absurd, but I didn’t realize how absurd until I saw Ed’s compilation of the numbers. Notably, it means even if OpenAI meets its projected revenue numbers (which are absurdly optimistic, like bigger than Netflix and Spotify and several other services combined) paying Oracle (along with everyone else it has promised to buy compute from) will put it net negative on revenue until 2030, meaning it has to raise even more money.
I’ve been assuming Sam Altman has absolutely no real belief that LLMs would lead to AGI and has instead been cynically cashing in on the sci-fi hype, but OpenAI’s choices don’t make any long term sense if AGI isn’t coming. The obvious explanation is that at this point he simply plans to grift and hype (while staying technically within the bounds of legality) to buy few years of personal enrichment. And to even ask what his “real beliefs” are gives him too much credit.
Just to remind everyone: the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!
Whichever one of you did https://alignmentalignment.ai/caaac/jobs, well done, and many lols.
CAAAC is an open, dynamic, inclusive environment, where all perspectives are welcomed as long as you believe AGI will annihilate all humans in the next six months.
Alright, I can pretend to believe that, go on…
We offer competitive salaries and generous benefits, including no performance management because we have no way to assess whether the work you do is at all useful.
Incredible. I hope I get the job!
The Wall Street Journal came out with a story on “conspiracy physics”, noting Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder as examples. Sadly, one of their quoted voices of sanity is Scott Aaronson, baking-soda volcano of genocide apologism.
Somehow,
Palpatine returnedScott came off as a voice of reasonBehold the power of this fully selective quotation.
Being compared to whackjobs with a worse grip on reality than him definitely helped.
Since appearing on Piers Morgan’s show, Eric Weinstein has taken to expounding additional theories about physics. Peer review was created by the government, working with Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, to control science, he said on “Diary of a CEO,” one of the world’s most popular podcasts. Jeffrey Epstein was sent by an intelligence agency to throw physics off track and discourage space exploration, keeping humanity trapped in “the prison built by Einstein.”
Heartbreaking! Weinstein isn’t fully wrong. Maxwell’s daddy was Robert Maxwell, who did indeed have a major role in making Springer big and kickstarting the publish-or-perish model, in addition to having incredibly tight Mossad ties; the corresponding Behind the Bastards episodes are subtitled “how Ghislane Maxwell’s dad ruined science.” Epstein has been accused of being a Mossad asset tasked with seeking out influential scientists like Marvin Minsky to secure evidence for blackmail and damage their reputations. As they say on Reddit, everybody sucks here.
First domino: US government invents peer review
Last domino: Richard Stallman successfully kamikazes his reputation for good after multiple close attempts over the years
Richard Stallman successfully kamikazes his reputation for good after multiple close attempts over the years
He still maintains a solid reputation with FOSS freaks, fascists and pedophiles to this day. Given the Venn diagram of these three groups is a circle, this isn’t particularly shocking.
Fuck, your lack of history is depressing sometimes. That Venn diagram is well-pointed, even among people who have met RMS, and the various factions do not get along with each other. For a taste, previously on Lobsters you can see an avowed FLOSS communist ripping the mask off of a Suckless cryptofascist in response to a video posted by a recently-banned alt-right debate-starter.
I often love your stuff, but this ain’t it.
That’s just yer bog-standard “the best lie has a seed of truth”, ainnit?
(Peer review in its modern form was adopted gradually, with a recognizable example in 1831 from the same William Whewell who coined the word scientist. It displaced the tradition of having the editor of a journal decide everything himself, so whatever its flaws, it has broadened the diversity of voices that influence what gets officially published.)
Epstein was a sophon controlled trisolaran asset working to prevent crucial development of physics!!! j/k
The Grauniad has a new piece today about the underpaid human labor on which the “AI” industry depends:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/11/google-gemini-ai-training-humans
Most workers said they avoid using LLMs or use extensions to block AI summaries because they now know how it’s built. Many also discourage their family and friends from using it, for the same reason.
In more low-key news, French voice actor Françoise Cadol has accused Aspyr Media of making an AI replica of her voice for the latest Tomb Raider remaster (the French one specifically, though its probably not the only one with AI slop voices).
Examples of the AI-generated voicelines have popped up on social media.
OT: in happier news thats now doomed to be totally overshadowed: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/mars-potential-life-1.7630035
(I’m a massive astrobio/SETI nerd)
Can you recommend any resources on those topics?
I can drop some books when I get off work! The SETI subreddit is pretty good about posting the latest studies too.
https://www.amazon.ca/Elusive-Wow-Searching-Extraterrestrial-Intelligence/dp/0983958440 https://www.amazon.ca/Astrobiology-Understanding-Universe-Charles-Cockell/dp/1119550351 https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548649/extraterrestrial-languages/
These are all good. Elusive Wow might be harder to find, but its worth looking up the authors career (it was his hobby).
I’ve noticed Rationalists otoh tend to repeat whatever Anders Sandberg says and are ideologically wedded to a dead universe view of things.
Re dead universe.
That fixes the great filter problem for them.
Considering other life might also be unattractive as it could reduce the feeling of their own importance.
(massive bong rip) the aliens already came here and put us all in the Matrix, dude
exhales not sure this is weed dude.
These people are no fun at all.
Word of warning, if you are squeemish, Charlie Kirk got shot, and closeup videos of him getting shot are over social media and people have not put warnings up. Managed to avoid it myself, but careful with autoplaying gifs, and use this link https://bsky.app/profile/nycsouthpaw.bsky.social/post/3lyiw3vi3yc2c for instructions how to turn that off.
Irrationally annoyed at yanks incorrecting each other how this kind of shot could only be pulled off by a trained expert sniper. The Behind the Bastards guy agrees, but the replies are still stuffed with examples.
I know from experience that even mediocre conscripts shooting a gun for the first time in their life usually manage to land hits in a one foot diameter circle from 150 metres with iron sights on an intermediate catridge rifle. It doesn’t take an elite marksman to hit a sitting man from 200 yards away, especially with a scope. Even if nervous and high on adrenaline, an average hunter, target shooter or (ex) military type would be more likely than not to hit a target of that size at that distance, assuming otherwise decent conditions.
Hell, the factory sights on an M16 are supposed to be set for zero elevation at 250 metres and the effective range for most assault rifles and their semi auto civilian variants is around 300 metres. To say you need to be a trained sniper to make this shot is like saying you need to be a professional racing driver to do 80 mph on a highway.
If there’s one thing you’d assume seppos know well, it’s shooting firearms, but some people still can’t help but spout dumb bullshit.
Yeah, I think the whole ‘quickly getting away without leaving a trace’ is more sign of some training. But, this is reduced in being likely by the whole FBI just being filled with incompetent goons, podcasters, racists, who are now playing ‘find the person of color’ and not doing the actual FBI things.
I mean I have no high opinion of groypers, so I don’t think they are well trained soldiers or something so take that into account. Exmil just has a higher willingness to kill people.
But yes, very good to point out thanks. Esp as Evans has experience in these things, and can generally be relied upon. (Apart from his views on 40k being too rosy).
We can prob rule out a Luigi style killer as there was no shellcasing with words on it found as far as I can tell.
Even in Luigi’s case, it took days to catch a guy who (allegedly, lol) killed a billionaire in the middle of Manhattan. Though very dashing, Mangione hardly seems like a navyseal elite supersoldier ninja hitman 47 either. Whatever Kirk’s killer’s motive, I see little reason to assume it was necessarily a pro job. All this tells us is that overfunding and militarization doesn’t equate to a more competent police force.
Yeah, and he had motive because of his intense pain, still a weird Rationalist adjacent type guy was not a likely subject. And sadly we knew the latter already.
It has been long long ago, but I recall that when London put CCTVs everywhere the chief of police there admitted it had not caused a drop in crime not helped them catch criminals. But he still wanted to place more of them and more money. Just a strange sort of welfare project for pervert police people.
also, I was at Bible study with Luigi at the time a CEO coincidentally had a bullet-involved collision, as were you
During the lead of usual speed incident?
Yep we were, we were talking about hiring jetskis. Strange how they never used the pictures of him on the jetski in the news like how they do with all the white guys who shoot up a place. Wait, that means they know he was innocent just like we do.
Reports are shell cases with messages have been found. My money is still on it being a false flag.
LOL ofc I spoke too soon, the “messages” were apparently random arrows
I’m hearing that the “messages” are mundane manufacturer markings misinterpreted
Fyi that manufacturer does not make 30 06 ammo. So it isnt true. Story goes that the source for the whole messages story is Crowder, that he dropped it before the mainstream news. Not a reliable source, wtf media.
crowder just mad that the title on the tent was “prove me wrong” and not “change my mind”
Yeah, to me the whole finding of casings makes no sense. Like if you put a message on them, leave them there. (also bolt your gun if you might want to shoot it again). Just odd. Also odd they don’t mention the messages on them directly. Which normally get plastered all over social media. (Which is bad btw, don’t spread extremist messaging without context, I really hope they finally learned this, and this isn’t a case of them hiding the message to make it sound more extreme than it was).
But yes, I spoke too soon. Anyway, as I’m the negative Cassandra, let me say this. We can rule out it being a Rationalist, we have not found a copy of HPMOR on the scene as far as I can tell.
E: update on the writing, might be wrong
Even if we had the shooter may have just been looking for something heavy enough to brace against for the shot. You can’t exactly carry a set of encyclopedias up to the top of the book depository or wherever without attracting attention.
You can’t exactly carry a set of encyclopedias up to the top of the book depository or wherever without attracting attention.
Not sure about that, I don’t want to talk about specifics as I rather not have people know exactly where I live but you could do a lot on the roofs of our uni without people noticing. Doors were not even locked.
But it makes sense for a shooter to bring something they know the hight off, like their personally signed copy of HPMOR.
“One of our guys was murdered; it could have only been an elite Navy SEAL with over 300 confirmed kills!!!” them, probably
Thoughts and prayers, definitely no curses.
Hecate left no crumbs
I have spend the last few hours looking through all my social media posts making sure I delete any bad things I have said about witches.
The covens appreciate the overture.
JFC if he dies he’s the new Horst Wessel
We’re already seeing some of the less circumspect fash call this their Reichstag Fire.
According to this https://bsky.app/profile/esqueer.net/post/3lyj2o4cuvc2g , and I think a fox news news report he is dead.
He was shot while he was trying to blame gun violence on trans people and gang violence basically. In a moment of weird poetry.
But I just posted this here to warn people. A tip if you see something traumatic: https://bsky.app/profile/baroness.bsky.social/post/3lyj32qx2os2f go play some videogames to not sear it into your mind.
Anyway, doubt they will make the diaper guy the new Horst Wessel.
E: a awful.systems relevant lol: https://bsky.app/profile/lasergiant.bsky.social/post/3lyixmkzfuc2r
he also said that kids should watch public executions https://www.newsweek.com/charlie-kirk-death-penalty-public-executions-1873073 and was shot directly under giant banner that reads “PROVE ME WRONG”
technically it’s a school shooting so not sure why conservatives care at all about it. he died like he lived, moving goalposts
Yep, he sucked. Big question I have is why. He is a propagandist in the ‘free speech on campus’ wars, and they won the battle and unis are caving and banning free speech. Of all the targets he makes no sense to me (not that any of them do to me, assassination has a very poor track record, people still whine about Pim in the Netherlands, and pretend all violence comes from the left (despite reality proving otherwise)).
So considering his history with groypers, who got big partially attacking Kirk for not being extreme enough, wouldn’t be shocked if it is a groyper. Or an exmil who lost a kid in a shooting.
I mean why shoot the guy that looks like a budget steven crowder and a broken stretchy arms toy doll had a teleporter accident.
Imagine if it turns out that it wasn’t even politically motivated and he just owed a bunch of money or something.
i didn’t even thought he was relevant anymore since 2020, he was like 2017 era chud debatelord who relied entirely on gotchas. he did toe the party line tho, so maybe some divergent rightwinger didn’t like what he was doing for whatever reason. maybe it was situation like with trump shooter, probable republican that didn’t particularly like epstein link, or whatever else cause there might be involved
I don’t think he has been relevant, he was on some 1 X debates 20 !X shows, where he showed the creepiest smile after being wrong about latin, and that was it. For the relevance of things I heard about him.
Turns out he was relevant to the right whoever. As he apparently kept pushing the epstein link (I thought he was dismissing the epstein link) so much so that Laura Loomer decided she never wanted to hear from the guy a few days ago.
Just very weird from what I can tell of the people of his ilk, for too online leftwingers he was a joke. Compared to a shapiro/crowder.
huh i honestly had no idea, and i guessed he was very replaceable in rw propaganda machine. i heard somewhere that shapiro was also supposed to be there
The video’s also all over Twitter, thanks to nonexistent moderation.
Damn, I was hoping someone would finally recognize the true value of the ASCII-art goatse that used to show up on Slashdot all the time, before this inevitably came to pass
Why progressives should care about falling birth rates
2 weeks old, but regardless. The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch wrote a very EA-adjacent article basically making the case for “progressive” eugenics. The studies he cites all derive from a behavior-genetic model of intergenerational value transmission, i.e. conservatism is “in the genes” & progressivism is literally getting bred out of the gene pool.
A masterclass in baiting liberals. Take note, NYT & Atlantic!
Just give the birthrates a cane or a walker if they keep falling. I don’t see why we should care more than that.
deleted by creator
Some quality wordsmithing found in the wild:
transcript
@MosesSternstein (quote-twitted): AI-Capex is the everything cycle, now.
Just under 50% of GDP growth is attributable to AI Capex
@bigblackjacobin: Almost certainly the greatest misallocation of capital you or I will ever see. There’s no justification for this however you cut it but the beatings will continue until a stillborn god is born.
For posterity’s sake, here’s the Tweet source.
Nice. Here’s the bluesky account as well.
OpenAI’s trying to make an AI-generated animated film, and claiming their Magical Slop Extruderstm can do in nine months what allegedly would take three years, with only a $30 mil budget and the writers of Paddington in Peru for assistance.
Allegedly, they’re also planning to show it off at the Cannes Film Festival, of all places. By my guess, this was Sam Altman’s decision - he’s already fawned over AI-extruded garbage before, its clear he has zero taste in art whatsoever.
$30 mil budget
From what I heard that is twice the budget of a Studio Ghibli movie. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).
Well you have to assume they need $29 million alone for humans doing color correction to make it less yellow
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind cost 1 million to make in 1984. (No idea what that would be adjusted for inflation).
I checked a few random inflation calculators, and it comes out to roughly $3.1 million.
Thanks!
OpenAI’s tools also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content, he said.
So, even working under the assumption that this somehow works, they still needed two animation studios, professional writers, and 30 million to get this film off the ground.
and the budget for fixing literally every frame afterwards, as with their previous demos
I mean he doesn’t seem to taste food either, so it tracks
Heard about the below last night; apparently survivors are forced into arbitration, so only the dead can sue. IANAL but thats pretty messed up.
I hadn’t seen this article yet about the hardware economics underpinning the LLM hype, but it’s really pretty good https://gauthierroussilhe.com/en/articles/how-to-use-computing-power-faster
university where the professor physically threatened me and plagiarized my work called to ask if i was willing to teach a notoriously hard computer science class (that i have taught before to stellar evals as a phd student[1]). but they had to tell me that i was their last choice because they couldn’t find a full professor to teach it (since i didn’t finish my phd there because of said abusive professor). on top of that, they offered me a measly $6,000 usd for the entire semester with no benefits, and i would have to pay $500 for parking.
should i just be done with academia? enrollment deadlines for the spring are approaching and i’m wondering if i should just find a “regular job”, rather than finishing a PhD elsewhere, especially given the direction higher ed is going in the us.
evals are bullshit for measuring how well students actually learn anything, but are great for measuring the stupid shit business idiots love, like whether students will keep paying tuition. also they can be used to explain the pitfalls of using likert scales carelessly, as business idiots do. ↩︎
Every time I learn one single thing about how academia works in the USA I want to commit unspeakable acts of violence
imo academia in the us selects for self-serious mini-tyrants. people unable to sleaze their way to an equivalent position in the job market, so they go with a position where their subordinates have no agency or recourse for inappropriate behavior and are entirely dependent on them for their funding and their career progress[1]. the university system here seems to only care if a professor brings in grant money — if so, they can do whatever they want.
e.g. a year ago a student of mine with a documented, legally required accommodation was just straight denied it by a professor in my department. this poor student had to go through some equal opportunity claim just to have his accommodation met, and the professor is still there, having suffered no consequences.
maybe i should apply to a phd program outside of the us. i speak spanish (but slowly, y como un gringo) 🤷
😭
by standing up to my piece of shit advisor, i have left with just a master’s degree after five years, despite definitely having enough research completed under this advisor to leave with a phd. i chose to stand up for myself and try to end this cycle instead of adding an acronym to my title. arguably a mistake, idk, there is a robert frost poem about this. ↩︎
I got paid $2700 for teaching a semester. Adjuncting sucks. It doesn’t get better.
Even if you finished, all the postdocs I know had their NSF starter kit yanked.
sorry my friend, that is really brutal. wishing you the best. ❤
simon willison, the self-styled reasonable ai researcher, finds it hilarious and a good use of money throwing $14000 at claude to create an useless programming language that doesn’t work.
good man simon willison!
I mean it’s still just funny money seeing the creator works for some company that resells tokens from Claude, but very few people are stepping back to note the drastically reduced expectations of LLMs. A year ago, it would have been plausible to claim that a future LLM could design a language from scratch. Now we have a rancid mess of slop, and it’s an “art project”, and the fact it’s ersatz internally coherent is treated as a great success.
Willison should just have let this go, because it’s a ludicrous example of GenAI, but he just can’t help himself defending this crap.
Top-tier from Willison himself:
The learning isn’t in studying the finished product, it’s in watching how it gets there.
Mate, if that’s true, my years of Gentoo experience watching compiler commands fly past in the terminal means I’m a senior operating system architect.
which naturally leads us to: having to fix a portage overlay ~= “compiler engineer”
wonder what simonw’s total spend (direct and indirect) in this shit has been to date. maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
maybe sunk cost fallacy is an unstated/un(der?)accounted part in his True Believer thing?
Probably. Beyond throwing a shitload of cash into the LLM money pit, Willison’s completely wrapped his public image up in being an AI booster, having spent years advocating for AI and “learning” how to use it.
If he admits he’s wrong about LLMs, he has to admit the money and time he spent on AI was all for nothing.
he’s claiming he is taking no llm money with exception of specific cases, but he does accept api credits and access to early releases, which aren’t payments only when you think of payments in extremely narrow sense of real money being exchanged.
this would in no way stand if he were, say, a journalist.
if you call him an AI promoter he cites his carefully organised blog posts of concerns
meanwhile he was on the early access list for GPT-5
Good sneer from user andrewrk:
People are always saying things like, “surprisingly good” to describe LLM output, but that’s like when 5 year old stops scribbling on the walls and draws a “surprisingly good” picture of the house, family, and dog standing outside on a sunny day on some construction paper. That’s great, kiddo, let’s put your programming language right here on the fridge.
Sigh. Love how he claims it’s worth it for “learning”…
We already have a thing for learning, it’s called “books”, and if you want to learn compiler basics, $14000 could buy you hundreds of copies of the dragon book.
$14,000 could probably still buy you a lesser Porsche in decent shape, but we should praise this brave pioneer for valuing experiences over things, especially at the all-important boundary of human/machine integration!
(no, I’m not bitter at missing the depreciation nadir for 996-era 911s, what are you talking about)
I’ve learned so much langdesign and stuff over the years simply by hanging around plt nerds, didn’t even need to spend for a single dragon book!
(although I probably have a samizdat copy of it somewhere)
“Engineering a Compiler” is a better read than the Dragon Book anyway
oi no spoilers ;p
That the useless programming language is literally called “cursed” is oddly fitting, because the continued existence of LLMs is a curse upon all of humanity
