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.)
TERF obsessed with AI finds out the “degenerate” ani skin for grok has an X account, loses her shit
https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1972848657625198827#m
then follows up with this wall of text
https://xcancel.com/groks_therapist/status/1973127375107006575#m
I got bored and flipped to the replies. The first was this by “TERFs ‘r’ us”:
Excellent overview!
This is transhumanism.
This is going to destroy humanity, @elonmusk.
Put the breaks on!
I hate transhumanism because it’s eugenics for 1990s Wired magazine.
You hate it because it has “trans” in the name.
We are not the same.
A man’s co-workers pressure him to embrace vibe cooking.
The AI industry is getting sneered by the dictionary.
what is “linear definitional bias”
The sound a vibe coder makes while edging to Ani
(This is also what all their other words mean)
Whatever the precise definition, it appears to be comorbid with stimulant dependency
C’mon bro, it’s just a bag of words bro~ We actually discussed this previously, on Awful, and this comment is a reply for them in particular.
dictionaries are obsolete bricks remembers that they are useful that’s why they’re actually ai when you think about it
The dictionary doesnt tell me how wise and smart my misinterpretation of a basic idea is and then tells me im right weird AI bro.
In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.
Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?
Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!
https://bsky.app/profile/emily.gorcen.ski/post/3m25263bs3c2g
image description
A pair of tweets, containing the text
Daniel aka ZONEofTECH on x.com: “Ahhh…this is…not good. My Samsung Galaxy Ring’s battery started swelling. While it’s on my finger 😬. And while I’m about to board a flight 😬 Now I cannot take it off and this thing hurts. Any quick suggestions
Update:
- I was denied boarding due to this (been travelling for ~47h straight so this is really nice 🙃). Need to pay for a hotel for the night now and get back home tomorrow👌
- was sent to the hospital, as an emergency
- ring got removed
You can see the battery all swollen. Won’t be wearing a smart ring ever again.
At least it wasn’t a cock ring.
Let’s be honest: These are exactly the sort of people who will stick their dicks into the Torment Nexus.
It almost surely has been done, but dare I ask where one can find trashy romance a la “pegged by the basilisk”
“Pegged in the ass by a physical manifestation of an online forum thought exercise gone horribly wrong” should be a Tingler if it isn’t already one.
Is your ring even swole, bro
YaaS: Yubitsume as a Service
In a move that is not in any way ominous, and everyone involved has carefully thought through all the consequences, there’s a sora-generated video of sam altman shoplifting gpus that’s apparently quite popular right now.
https://bsky.app/profile/drewharwell.com/post/3m23ob342h22a
(no embed because safari on ipad is weird about downloading or linking video)
If the AI industry gets bailed out (and that’s a multi-hundred billion dollar “if”), it will be because the technology they create makes shit like this possible.
To try and end this on a somewhat lighter note (source):
can someone catch me up to speed on what the latest nix fiasco is?
@mawhrin@awful.systems summarized it nicely but if you want some fresh abyss to stare into, here’s some links to fedi posts with details:
thanks, I hate it 🫠
looks like more things are occurring? https://www.haskellforall.com/2025/10/nix-steering-committee-vote-of-no.html
in short, the whole moderation team resigned because of interference from the steering commitee; inb4 palmer luckey crowing about how no-one in the project will stop anduril from using nixos to build american military domination.
you know, just another day of the fascist takeover of the nixos project.
Elon Musk announces “Grokipedia”, which is exactly what it sounds like.
for article in wikipedia: grok.is_this_true(article)The Gizmodo story mentions that he retweeted Larry Sanger, but it doesn’t dive into the rabbit hole of just how much of a kook Sanger is and how badly his would-be Wikipedia competitors have failed.
Lol maintaining a wiki is so much work always much respect for people who actually try to keep one up to date and filled with good info. Of course the fraud thinks he knows better without having ran one.
He would have a heart attack if he had to write a complex mediawiki script.
A small taste:
{{if|{{{1|}}}...Gork is this true?
Gort is Klaatu barada nikhto?
Trok is this grue?
Shaka, when the walls fell?
Grue? Is this Zork?
Or perhaps it is bleen
Newsom signed the AI Bill (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-law-california-ca-companies-regulation-newsom-rcna234562) but looks like they took out the private right of action vs the one last year that he vetoed, so basically defanged.
I do predict even more compliance pop ups in the near future though.
Article posted here just for the line: “AI-made material is a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind”
Our final defenses are more diffuse, working at a level of norms and attitudes. Stigmatization is a powerful force, and disgust and shame are among our greatest tools. Put plainly, you should feel bad for using AI.
Nice find. There are specific reasons why this patchset won’t be merged as-is and I suspect that they’re all process issues:
- Bad memory management from Samsung not developing in the open
- Proprietary configuration for V4L2 video devices from Samsung not developing with modern V4L2 in mind
- Lack of V4L2 compliance report from Samsung developing against an internal testbed and not developing with V4L2’s preferred process
- Lack of firmware because Samsung wants to maintain IP rights
Using generative tooling is a problem, but so is being stuck in 2011. Linux doesn’t permit this sort of code dump.
Oh hey, bay area techfash enthusing about AI and genocidal authoritarians? Must be a day ending in a Y. Today it is Vercel CEO and next.js dev Guillermo Rauch
https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/1972669025525158031
image description
A screenshot of a tweet by Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel. There’s a photograph of him next to Netanyahu. The tweet reads:
Enjoyed my discussion with PM Netanyahu on how Al education and literacy will keep our free societies ahead. We spoke about Al empowering everyone to build software and the importance of ensuring it serves quality and progress. Optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbors.
I also have strong opinions about not using next.js or vercel (and server-side javascript in general is a bit of a car crash) but even if you thought it was great you should probably have a look around for alternatives. Just not ruby on rails, perhaps.
Amazing how they all went from oh us poor nerds vs the jocks to bending the knee and licking the boots of the strongmen. see also YT bribing Trump.
…to “it’s OUR TIME NOW”, cf. the most recent two blogs from david heinemeier hansson, palmer fucking luckey in recent nixos thing etc. etc.
pushy rationalist tried to glom onto and fly to meet my niche internet microcelebrity friend & i talked her through setting boundaries instead of installing this person in her life. my good deed for the week
AI video generation use case: hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days, such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
It his the uncanny valley triggers quite hard. It’s faintly unsettling t watch at all, but every individual detail is just wrong and dreamlike in a bad way.
Also, weird scenery clipping, just like real kids did back in the day!
https://bsky.app/profile/mugrimm.bsky.social/post/3lzy77zydrc2q
genuinely think nostalgia might be the most purely evil emotion, and every one of these RETVRN ai videos i see strengthens that belief
It is a literal gateway to fascism imho, esp when people get into nostalgia for a time that never was.
And compared to nostalgia for mom n pop stores, this even is nostalgia for a mass produced product.
hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days
Nostalgiabait is the slopgens’ specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn’t an issue if you’re trying to fabricate an idealis-
such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I’ve got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck’s so different across the pond?
(Even from a “making nostalgiabait” angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD’s directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you’ve got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)
I will say that the flipping between characters in order to disguise the fact that longer clips are impractical to render is a neat trick and fits well into the advert-like design, but rewatching it just really reinforces how much those kids look like something pretending real hard to be a human.
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
I was gonna say that was probably the slop extruder’s doing, but it looks to have been applied manually for some godforsaken reason. Best guess is whoever was behind this audiovisual extrusion thought “celluloid filter = Nostalgiatm”.
I suspect it is also hiding some rendering artefacts.
I imagine it helps with the slightly plastic look that skin still gets too
The US economy is 100% on coyote time.
It wouldn’t matter if everyone came to their senses today. All the money that’s been invested into AI is gone. It has been turned into heat and swiftly-depreciating assets and can never be recouped.
It’s surreal isn’t it?
AI Shovelware: One Month Later by Mike Judge
The fact that we’re not seeing this gold rush behavior tells you everything. Either the productivity gains aren’t real, or every tech executive in Silicon Valley has suddenly forgotten how capitalism works.
… por que no los dos …
Or, this is how capitalism has always worked. See Enron for example. And we all just got so enthralled by the number (praised be its rise) that we took the guardrails off. The rising tidal wave which will flood all the land, raises all boats after all.
The goal of capitalism is not to produce goods, it is to create value for the owners of the capital. See also why techbros are turning on EA and EA (which EA is which, is left as an exercise to the reader).
Disappointed this wasn’t Beavis & Butt-head/King of the Hill/Office Space/Idiocracy/Silicon Valley Mike Judge
in my headcanon it is and he’s just been moonlighting tv for the last 25y
