Want to wade into the spooky 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.
cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to
And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:
“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob
https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979
It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT
It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.
but never a sex bot
Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says “we” he only means the present cohort of microsofties.
Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.
I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.
Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.
https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood
alt text
A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text “finishing this fight”, “destroy the flood” and a link to “join ice gov”.
NB: a few cocktails in. Don’t really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.
Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so it’s pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. It’s initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.
If these plugs are too much, please let me know: the second episode of our podcast on historical bigoted/misogynist texts is out now. “Woman, thy name is russia.”
https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social/post/3m4cjzttdek2f
Oh look, my delivery from the Nightmare Factory arrived!
Seriously tho, thats not a “tendon,” that’s a nylon rope on a pulley, and thats not a robot, thats some kind of skinny feller in knitted gimp suit. This is just insulting.
Also, imagine the factorial number of germs it would absorb from scrubbing the toilet. You’d need to invent some kind of new branch of farticle physics to describe the bacterial load that thing would develop. Do you suppose that it takes off its own skin to wash ala Hooty from The Owl House?
Edit: orange site loves it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736457
Wsj reviewed it, looks nothing like the ad imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
That WSJ review is something special and I didn’t have sound on or CC so I’m sure there’s some weapons-grade stupid going on in dialog that I am missing. I stopped watching about when they put up a picture of Allen Turing (AI Pioneer!) and a picture of the “AI Pilot” who’s first name is Turing and then highlighted that both have the word "Turing in their names.
Also that overgrown Roomba with hip dysplasia took 5 minutes to put two glasses in a dishwasher poorly.
The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)
Teleoperator is watching you masturbate
Is that why the robot is wrapped in a giant cum-sock?
It’s grim, innit?
long hand of casey newton (by proxy) outputs a weird hit piece on ed zitron in wired https://archive.is/chsCw so far bluesky in shambles with no other effects
Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”
Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.
i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.
on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he’ll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he’s concealing it, I don’t like the association whether he’s open about it or not.
on the… third hand? when i’ve read his posts, i’ve found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he’s an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn’t interested in trying to make that article happen
I think Zitron has posted that none of these companies is profitable. Midjourney claims to be making a profit since 2024 although that depends on not paying for the IP they use etc. etc. etc. (and private companies can claim all kinds of things about their balance sheets without the CEO going to jail if they are creative).
his conclusions are a lot more complex than that none of these companies is profitable
He, or someone, should work with Bethany McLean on checking Zitron’s work. She cowrote The Smartest Guys In The Room about Enron in 2003 and a book about the 2008 financial crisis. In 2001 she wrote about thinking something was hinky about Enron’s financial filings.
Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.
I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron
TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.
In my day people were ashamed of being mad in the newspaper.
wint @dril 29 Dec 2014 and another thing: im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad.
I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, “a total fucking douchebag.”
It’s true, the french are no fans of computer glasses.
“who some describe as a pioneer in wearable computing, and others describe as an intolerable douche”
OpenAI’s data stealing scheme disguised as a browser can be prompt injected. In other news, water is wet.
EDIT: How did I not notice I was referring to OpenAI as ChatGPT (anyways, fixed it now)
i wonder if someone pointed that thing at tarpit already
Oreo has shoved 40 million in wads of cash between two sloppy biscuits. You see, if they don’t do it, then Hydrox is gonna partner with DeepSeek. This is just business, it’s not a bubble
Oreo: the cookie that doesn’t need a marketing department.
You know the old saw that half the money spent on marketing is wasted, just nobody knows which half? Thanks to AI we now know it’s the half that’s spent on AI.
Employee at ‘plagiarism company’ defending transition to ‘plagiarism + pushing sex content onto children company’ insists that the reason they are pushing smut slop onto kids is due to their passion for creativity.
S-tier big brain ai safety researcher chimes in:
Masterful gambit, sir. Why didn’t we consider the fact that “automating all labour would produce more revenue”?
“How dare you suggest that we pivoted to SlopTok and smut because of money if something that we totally cannot do right now is more lucrative?”
I realize it’s been poisoned since/by coiners, but god I hate that usage of “democratize”
Just pretend that it’s coming from a different root word “mocratize” meaning the opposite of whatever the fuck crypto is doing
could I, like, not do that? would suit my needs better. kthx
thanks for asking.
Noof course
it’s democratic if i couldn’t do it yesterday but i can do it today, even though it’s not the same in any meaningful way
edit: in all seriousness, it’s disgusting the way they are pretending there is some noble intention behind any of this.
yeah it’s very much an intentional usage of poisoned language to construct a targeted outcome
but arrrrrrgh
Lightly concealing his identity behind a generated anime avatar may be the wisest thing that kid ever did
What professional athlete is a) working for OpenAI and b) wants to turn Sora into the bottomless fountain of goon?
A horny one.
And just as importantly, free-sprinted
Oh God my brain is so used to turning typos into likely intended words that I missed “free-sprinted”, which I’m going to guess in this context involves being athletic and horny and bottomless and possibly suffering from protein-powder-induced lead poisoning.
That might explain why copilot is a cum sprite
Really, Colin?
any of y’all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it
The first couple Eko Eko Azarak movies. Grade-A B-horror Japanese schlock, main character is a Satanist witch teenage detective, more or less. Her goddamn name is Kuroi Misa (“Black Mass”), I love her so much. Perfect if you like brainless gore and non-irony-poisoned creepy movies for spooky week.
The movies are currently on Youtube in full. I’m also watching the 1997 TV series but after episode #3 you’ll need to speak Japanese. The movies are better than the series anyway (the first two at least, haven’t watched the others.)
She Rides Shotgun - basically Lone Wolf and Cub + Breaking Bad combo. I loved the novel back when it came out, the film is reasonably faithful to it.
Watched Once Upon A Time in Space recently - pretty damn good documentary series.
I’ve been meaning to catch Adam Curtis’s latest but I just haven’t got around to it yet.
Trying to think of what ai’ve seen new lately instead of rewatched and drawing a blank. Edge of Darkness (the brit one) was quite good.
rewatched all of DS9 over a while, its writing hits even harder in the current year
(apple shows but that can be worked around:) invasion, slow horses, shrinking
haven’t been watching a lot of series tho so limited bucket recommendation
Found out about a new space junk startup today.
One bold new startup is looking to cash in on the frenzy with a particularly bizarre approach: a massive array of space mirrors meant to reflect the Sun’s light down to paying subscribers.
The company has yet to launch any of the 4,000 satellite mirrors it sold in its far-out pitch. However, the startup recently applied for a license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a 60-by-60 foot demo craft in April of 2026, Space.com reported this week. That’s after winning a $1.25 million contract from the US Air Force, of all places, on top of a $20 million Series A funding round to build out its “sunlight on demand” service, which Reflect says will “strengthen the national defense of the United States of America.”
Astronomers, however, aren’t so gung-ho about the idea of a massive space mirror blinding the Earth with Sunlight.
“The reflectors will be directing their light [even after they pass their target] because obviously they can’t shut that off,” John Berentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory told Space.com. “The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation. That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well.”This has never been tried before and is a completely new idea.
@sundogplanets was posting about this not too long ago, I’ll try find the thread a bit later
e: thread
Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible “scroll driven” web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.
Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that’s not actually necessary.
That has to be intentionally bad.
Apologies for doing journal club instead of sneer club.
Voiseux, G., Tao Zhou, R., & Huang, H.-C. (Brad). (2025). Accepting the unacceptable in the AI era: When & how AI recommendations drive unethical decisions in organizations. Behavioral Science & Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607251384574
abstract:
In today’s workplaces, the promise of AI recommendations must be balanced against possible risks. We conducted an experiment to better understand when and how ethical concerns could arise. In total, 379 managers made either one or multiple organizational decisions with input from a human or AI source. We found that, when making multiple, simultaneous decisions, managers who received AI recommendations were more likely to exhibit lowered moral awareness, meaning reduced recognition of a situation’s moral or ethical implications, compared with those receiving human guidance. This tendency did not occur when making a single decision. In supplemental experiments, we found that receiving AI recommendations on multiple decisions increased the likelihood of making a less ethical choice. These findings highlight the importance of developing organizational policies that mitigate ethical risks posed by using AI in decision-making. Such policies could, for example, nudge employees toward recalling ethical guidelines or reduce the volume of decisions that are made simultaneously.
so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.
I would adore an awful journal club tbh
so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.
AI is an accountability sink by design, its technocapitalism working as designed
as a bonus, it’s also fascist!
To start this spooky Stubsack off, there’s signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:
Just a heads up I haven’t gotten a refund from my cancelled FW12 order. Framework seems to be having trouble figuring it out.
I don’t know why, maybe it is Canada or maybe it is a high volume of similar requests, but it is a sign I always find concerning in a company I am worried about the financial stability of.
Could be nothing, but if you have been wavering on a cancellation I figured you might want a heads up.
This comes two weeks after Framework’s public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. “Go fash, lose cash” proves itself again.
i’m trying to sell mine now
but also i don’t have any other computers and probably can’t afford anything
time for me to learn to use a pencil
The market should be flooded with used business laptops that can’t be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro
oh fuck, i didn’t think of that! thank you for the idea 💖
lightly used thinkpads are the classic choice for this — IT departments buy high spec ones then dump them for cheap a few years later in surplus sales or on eBay, and there are usually repair manuals and spare parts readily available. usually you can type the specific model and generation into a search and get a wiki page or at least a couple blog posts reporting how well they’re supported under linux, and Lenovo seems to intentionally do very well on compatibility since Linux compatibility is a nice checkbox for an enterprise laptop to have. just be careful you don’t get bamboozled into buying any of Lenovo’s consumer laptops, since they tend to be a fair bit cheaper and don’t have the same compatibility guarantees, repairability, or ample spare parts availability.
For sale: lenovo thinkpad, lightly used
-Earnest Hempingway
my laptop is a budget model from 2016 and it runs xfce smoothly and happily lol. i code on it and watch streams and play slay the spire and all the usual stuff. idk how the stylus changes things but the required specs for doing quite a lot with linux are negligible
thank you for the suggestion, this is good stuff.
deleted by creator
That post requires signing in to view; it’s a link to this: https://futurism.com/science-energy/trump-altman-plutonium-oklo
Ah apologies forgot to check.
Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman
The “Weapons Grade” part is almost certainly editorializing (hopefully), but this whole shit sounds like another Chernobyl waiting to happen
did you read either link
This sound like cyberpunk setting backstory, to explain how the continental US came to be managed by a fickle alliance between several corporate nuclear powers.
But I’m sure everything’s gonna be fine.
@BlueMonday1984 The “weapons grade” almost certainly means 239-Pu, which is used in bombs or fissile in reactors. (There are other isotopes but they’re not really useful for fueling reactors *or* making bombs.)
I’m rather partial to the idea of silly valley oligarchs putting crude A-bombs under the table at one another’s shareholder meetings.
every batch of plutonium is made mostly out of Pu-239 that’s just how plutonium works. it can’t be separated into isotopes in any meaningful amounts so any batch of plutonium is also a mix of a couple of isotopes. reactor grade might be something like 55% Pu-239 plus say 12% also fissile Pu-241 with the rest being nonfissile Pu-240, Pu-242 and Pu-238 in that order. the newer reactor and fuel pin design, the higher burnup and the less fissile isotopes will be present at the end of the cycle. even in purely uranium fueled reactor about third of energy at the end of the fuel cycle comes from plutonium bred in the same fuel pin. i can elaborate on that if you want to
@fullsquare AIUI for optimal nuclear weapons (ie. lightweight pits that maximize fission) you need to be very careful about which phase of metallic plutonium you use (it has dozens). IIRC an alloy with about 2% germanium in delta-phase is densest: make it with as close to 100% Pu-239 as you can get. (This was declassified in the 1970s.) You’re also going to need some tritium gas to fill the hollow core, and other exotica (never mind the carefully timed explosive lenses to drive the implosion).
so on top of that 1%-ish gallium (which stabilizes delta phase, the least dense one, that collapses under pressure to alpha, the most dense one, which allows slightly less compression to be used, and this means more compact weapons), which would need to be separated before that plutonium gets turned into MOX, i understand that most of american plutonium stockpiles are somewhere around 94% 239Pu, and some are 97%+. i guess they’re selling the worst stuff, which would make little difference for reactors, and if there’s anything that american military is good at, it’s logistics. on production side, the very shortened story is that we start with uranium and irradiate it, which gives
238U (n,gamma) 239U (beta) 239Np (beta) 239Pu
and that’s it. but it really is a bit more complicated, because first, nothing stops that just made plutonium from reacting further, so some of it will fission which means that it can’t be recovered, but it also means more neutrons, which will also make some plutonium, so it’s not all bad. but not all plutonium will fission, and so there’s entire series of reactions:
239Pu (n,gamma) 240Pu (n,gamma) 241Pu (n,gamma) 242Pu (n,gamma) 243Pu
at this point reaction stops because 243Pu is very short-lived, and it decays into 243Am. at the same time, if neutrons react without leaving fuel pin, they won’t be slowed down much, which means another reaction is possible (but much less likely):
242Pu (n,2n) 241Pu (n,2n) 240Pu (n,2n) 239Pu (n,2n) 238Pu
there’s also 238U (n,2n) 237U (beta) 237Np (n,gamma) 238Np (beta) 238Pu
of these, 238Pu and 240Pu have unacceptably high neutron emission rate, which means that if there’s too much of these nuclear weapon is likely to predetonate. because the most important use of plutonium in modern advanced thermonuclear weapons is in primary, this means that it could be so that entire weapon fails to function if there’s too much of these contaminants (low-kt or even sub-kt yield instead of, say, 350kt). of these, 238Pu and 241Pu have short halflives, which means that plutonium containing these will heat up with considerable power. this can damage explosives bonded to it. 240Pu is additionally a radiation hazard because of neutrons emitted, but it’s only really relevant for submarine crews. this is why these weapons use the better 97%+ grade plutonium, and additionally some of that 97% grade was made in order to blend with some older, worse quality stocks
there’s remarkably few parameters that can be used in order to steer these reactions in the way we want. about the only relevant one here would be neutron temperature, which is really chosen at reactor design stage and increasing it means that neutron capture is less likely. this makes fission more likely, more neutrons are present and more plutonium can be formed. this also turns reactor into fast reactor which are notoriously hard to build and iirc only russia and india operate large fast reactors today. short of that, about the only way to prevent 239Pu from reacting further is to take it out of there, which means low burnup and only tiny amounts can be recovered per run. from what i understand, the choice of 94%-ish 239Pu content is end effect of massive optimization problem focused on how to make a pit at the lowest price. this includes all the (expensive, slightly dangerous) labour it takes in reprocessing fuel and how required pit mass increases with lower quality plutonium
little of that matters when running a powerplant. some isotopes being neutron emitters are actually an advantage because it makes startup smoother. the longer fuel stays in reactor the less fissile plutonium there is as a result, and the more advanced reactors allowing higher burnups make plutonium recovery less attractive, or, in other words, most of benefit of recovering plutonium in order to put it in new fuel can be realized just by leaving fuel in reactor for longer time in the first place. in regular light water reactor, steady state develops where plutonium is formed as fast as it is consumed, and it accounts for about third of energy released when that steady state sets in. this also means that about third of fissile uranium can be replaced by fissile plutonium with no modifications to reactor
on top of weapons use, some countries do reprocessing anyway as a matter of policy as a hedge against future shortages of uranium. some of these schemes require fast reactors which can burn these isotopes useless in regular reactor and make fresh, weapons grade almost pure 239Pu, which limits countries that can make it work, by diplomatic means, only to already established nuclear powers, and labour costs needed for its operation limit it to currently only india and russia, and formerly france. this is because at any burnup, in best case plutonium can be only separated once from light water reactor fuel and used in light water reactor. after that, plutonium quality is too low to be useful this way
in comparison to reactor grade plutonium, weapons grade plutonium would allow to make more fuel per kg of this material, but also it would be astronomically expensive compared to regular stuff, which is already unprofitable for power generation in countries with western labour costs, unless it’s a fire sale. the second problem is that if more than this 1/3 of fissile isotopes in fresh fuel is plutonium, then generally reactors would need recertification or maybe completely new design, because plutonium gives less delayed neutrons which are critical for smooth control of reactor power. this is, mind you, in context of country that practically stopped building new nuclear powerplants. if small reactors are on the table, then these naturally need higher amount of fissile isotopes, like 20-30%, and something tells me people involved would like to try this
another thing to note here is that there’s an old american policy in place that forbids (domestic) plutonium recovery for alleged (international) nonproliferation reasons. i don’t believe this is the case, it makes zero sense, and instead i think that nuclear industry wanted a way out of that money pit without state backing, because plutonium recovery and reuse for power generation is more expensive than just buying more uranium, sustainability of this energy source and volume needed for nuclear waste be damned. they could get away with this because military weapons grade plutonium stockpiles were assessed as sufficient. now they’re pawning heirloom nukes to monorail salesmen instead
i don’t think so, it’s like megatons to megawatts but stupider, instead of using up uranium from adversary they want to use up their own plutonium, while also having policies against spent fuel reprocessing (for alleged nonproliferation reasons, which is patently bullshit, power generation was straight up cheaper this way because new uranium is cheaper than reprocessing and use of mox. some other countries (at minimum ru, fr, in, pk, jp, cn, il) do reprocessing as a matter of national security/energy independence/hedge against future shortages of uranium). also this requires recertification of reactors for mox use, which won’t always work or else only part of uranium can be replaced, and if it’s for smr, then there’s gonna be a lot of plutonium in there, and it all starts with handing plutonium to motherfucking sam altman, for only a slight chance of any positive results
i see it more as current administration ripping copper wiring from walls than anything else tbh
