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!)
Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/
It’s a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won’t copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:
- Grokipedia’s article on Wikipedia uses the word “ideological” or “ideologically” 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it’s Wikipedia article).
- Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “biological males”. The last paragraph of the article “The Wachowskis” is downright unhinged.
- The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.
Also certain articles have this at the bottom:
The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
KDE showing how it should be done:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html
Question:
I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.
Response:
We stopped posting on X for several reasons:
- The owner is a nazi
- The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
- (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
- Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.
Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.
We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.
The follow-up’s worth mentioning too:
It’s interesting they’re citing specifically DHH and Ladybird as examples to follow, considering:
https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
common KDE W
after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing
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
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”.
Unfortunately, the music director Marty O Donnell (iirc?) for og halo games is a bug trumper and ran for office. And he made absolute banger sound tracks too!
https://www.gamefile.news/p/halo-ice-developers-react
Dev team leads at least denouncing it as the disgusting shit it is.
That’s depressing… I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but I’d be hard pressed to do that with any other game… I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but can’t remember much else about their sound design.
Well, as far as I can tell, we still have Nile Rodgers.
Master Chief, you mind telling me what you are doing on that ICE propaganda?
Performing the SPARTAN Program’s original aim, sir.
hmmm, gotta name my future scifi franchise’s augmented monastic space marin-time infantry supersoldiers THEBANs
(yes homo)
bet they wouldn’t take kindly to Wolfenstein spamming in return
Yeah silence is being complicit in this case.
Trump also posted an image of him in the masterchief suit. Without a helmet. Halo is not my thing but I think that is a thing which is not done, like with judge dredd, the helmet stays on.
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.
Bungie made Marathon before Halo and it’s basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many “integrated” species. It’s a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.
OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pfor’s leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and there’s an eldrich horror living in a star too.
deleted by creator
Hey now, it’s also a clearly copy and pasted plagiarism of James Cameron’s Aliens!
I got more “the thing” vibes, tbh.
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.
two overlapping cookie opt-out popups:
Love when this happens and on your phone you cant even reach the buttons. The lost art of testing your websites.
The lost art of testing your websites.
i run with javascript disabled by default, and it’s actually refreshing when a website at least displays “this shit requires javascript lol” instead of just not working
the modern web sucks, let’s all train ravens like asoiaf
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.
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
Just subbed on podcast addict!
do please continue!
(i mean, like i can talk)
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)
Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.
(Anyone else noticed that in the promo vids?)
Also the wsj vid title. ‘the first’ are we really going to do this again? Call every new robot the first?
Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.
Feels like something you do to disempower eunuchs that have grown a little too cocky. Of course, this just leads to more scheming while you feel secure in having humiliated them. Just all around not something I recommend
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
Baldur Bjarnason’s (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.
(In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could’ve nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)
Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.
(And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).
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
looks pretty good to me, I’d be delighted to produce this sort of work and he’s doing loadbearing work on the numbers here - that the finance press is faintly catching up to a year later.
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.
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 “none of these companies is profitable”
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
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
horny and bottomless
truly a hellish predicament
Lightly concealing his identity behind a generated anime avatar may be the wisest thing that kid ever did
The kid arguing for deepfake porn ofc sees no problem with Ghiblifying himself with his plagiarism machine. Total fucking douchebag status.
Really, Colin?
any of y’all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it
The real housewives of Salt Lake City. I am not joking.
Dr. Stone new season dropped recently, Golden Kamuy new season ETA early next year
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.
> The Sun is a huge fusion reactor that supports all life on Earth.
I think you’ll find that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
yepp, unmistakeable
programmer placeholder graphics, least isn’t Aplle-product-level rowser bugout badThat 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!
