Want to wade into the snowy 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)
Introducing the Palantir shit sandwich combo: Get a cover up for the CEO tweaking out and start laying the groundwork for the AGI god’s priest class absolutely free!
https://mashable.com/article/palantir-ceo-neurodivergent
TL;DR- Palantir CEO tweaks out during an interview. Definitely not any drugs guys, he’s just neurodivergent! But the good, corporate approved kind. The kind that has extra special powers that make them good at AI. They’re so good at AI, and AI is the future, so Palantir is starting a group of neurodivergents hand picked by the CEO (to lead humanity under their totally imminent new AI god). He totally wasn’t tweaking out. He’s never even heard of cocaine! Or billionaire designer drugs! Never ever!
Edit: To be clear, no hate against neurodivergence, or skepticism about it in general. I’m neurodivergent. And yeah, some types of neurodivergence tend to result in people predisposed to working in tech.
But if you’re the fucking CEO of Palantir, surely you’ve been through training for public appearances. It’s funnier that it didn’t take, but this is clearly just an excuse.
I strongly feel that it’s an attempt to start normalizing the elevation of certain people into positions of power based off vague characteristics they were born with.
Lemmy post that pointed me to this: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51704917
just came across a wild banger:
(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)
I wish this attitude was more pervasive at Apple, my phone actually autocorrects to “Lock Screen” when I type it out in lower case.
Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share
did they use ai to make the image? “wood of of year”
It’s most obvious on the cat which is all around nightmare material.
The image also comes with alt text:
a bizarre collection of ai-generated illustrations including a sign that reads wood of of year and a chyron that reads breaking news
An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.
Sadly, it’s a Chomskian paper, and those are just too weak for today. Also, I think it’s sloppy and too Eurocentric. Here are some of the biggest gaffes or stretches I found by skimming Moro’s $30 book, which I obtained by asking a shadow library for “impossible languages” (ISBN doesn’t work for some reason):
book review of Impossible Languages (Moro, 2016)
- Moro claims that it’s impossible for a natlang to have free word order. There’s many counterexamples which could be argued, like Arabic or Mandarin, but I think that the best counterexample is Latin, which has Latinate (free) word order. On one hand, of course word order matters for parsers, but on the other hand the Transformers architecture attends without ordering, so this isn’t really an issue for machines. Ironically, on p73-74, Moro rearranges the word order of a Latin phrase while translating it, suggesting either a use of machine translation or an implicit acceptance of Latin (lack of) word order. I could be harsher here; it seems like Moro draws mostly from modern Romance and Germanic languages to make their points about word order, and the sensitivity of English and Italian to word order doesn’t imply a universality.
- Speaking of universality, both the generative-grammar and universal-grammar hypotheses are assumed. By “impossible” Moro means a non-recursive language with a non-context-free grammar, or perhaps a language failing to satisfy some nebulous geometric requirements.
- Moro claims that sentences without truth values are lacking semantics. Gödel and Tarski are completely unmentioned; Moro ignores any sort of computability of truth values.
- Russell’s paradox is indirectly mentioned and incorrectly analyzed; Moro claims that Russell fixed Frege’s system by redefining the copula, but Russell and others actually refined the notion of building sets.
- It is claimed that Broca’s area uniquely lights up for recursive patterns but not patterns which depend on linear word order (e.g. a rule that a sentence is negated iff the fourth word is “no”), so that Broca’s area can’t do context-sensitive processing. But humans clearly do XOR when counting nested negations in many languages and can internalize that XOR so that they can handle utterances consisting of many repetitions of e.g. “not not”.
- Moro mentions Esperanto and Volapük as auxlangs in their chapter on conlangs. They completely fail to recognize the past century of applied research: Interlingue and Interlingua, Loglan and Lojban, Láadan, etc.
- Sanskrit is Indo-European. Also, that’s not how junk DNA works; it genuinely isn’t coding or active. Also also, that’s not how Turing patterns work; they are genuine cellular automata and it’s not merely an analogy.
I think that Moro’s strongest point, on which they spend an entire chapter reviewing fairly solid neuroscience, is that natural language is spoken and heard, such that a proper language model must be simultaneously acoustic and textual. But because they don’t address computability theory at all, they completely fail to address the modern critique that machines can learn any learnable system, including grammars; they worst that they can say is that it’s literally not a human.
Plus, natural languages are not necessarily spoken nor heard; sign language is gestured (signed) and seen and many, mutually-incompatible sign languages have arisen over just the last few hundred years. Is this just me being pedantic or does Moro not address them at all in their book?
Here’s a substack post (sorry) with a quote I found both neat and pretty funny:
Integrity comes from the Latin “integer,” meaning whole or complete. A person with integrity is “whole” in the sense that their words, actions, and values are unified rather than fragmented or contradictory. They understand themselves; they have integrated the warring parts of themselves; and they respect and act on the values that their parts can agree upon.
Rationalists in shambles
https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru/issues/1454#issuecomment-3652003263.
Rust is terrible, rewrite in jai (?)
Getting mad because developers have not had time to update a piece of code that wraps another piece of code and blaming it on the language is in interesting choice.
Telling a whole project ‘your language sucks you should rewrite it in my pet language’ is always a nice classic of the nerd genre. (Happy I never got a big language hangup like that. (Apart from a short bit of a dislike of functional programming languages, but that was just due to a bad early experience)).
tf is jai
Why is Jai ground-breaking? Jai is so important because it is an effort to build a modern systems programming language from the ground up by a very gifted and experienced developer.
programmers. programmers never change.
With his knowledge of all C/C++ shortcomings, he rethought every one of these problems to give them an easier to use, more elegant and more performant solution. In this way Jai really is a better and modern day C, and also a C++ done right.
“14 competing ‘modern take on C’ languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++”
a very gifted and experienced developer.
Don’t forget the most crucial part. The very gifted and experienced developer … is Jonathan Blow.
who tf is zerophase (apart from a lunduke fan)
More on datacenters in space
https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters
N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off “wouldn’t it be cool” vibes (author “lives and breathes space” IRONIC IT’S A VACUUM
Also this is the only thermal mention
Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed
riiiiight…
Him fellating musk re tesla is funny considering the recent stories about reliability abd how the market is doing. And also the roadster 2, and the whole pivot to ai/ROBOTS!
Author works for something called Varda Space (guess who is one of the major investors? drink. Guess what orifice the logo looks like? drink) and previously tried to replicate a claimed room-temperature superconductor https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-diy-race-to-replicate-lk-99/
Some interesting ethnography of private space people in California: "People jump straight to hardware and hand-wave the business case, as if the economics are self-evident. They aren’t. "
Page uses that “electrons = electricity” metonymy that prompt-fonding CEOs have been using
The electrons is turning into an annoying shibboleth. Also going to age oddly if more light based components really kick off. (Ran into somebody who is doing some phd work on that, or at least that is what I got from the short description he gave).
I also enjoy :
Radiation/shielding impacts on mass ignored; no degradation of structures beyond panel aging
Getting high-powered electronics to work outside the atmosphere or the magnetosphere is hard, and going from a 100 meter long ISS to a 4 km long orbital data center would be hard. The ISS has separate cooling radiators and solar panels. He wants LEO to reduce the effects of cosmic rays and solar storms, but its already hard to keep satellites from crashing into something in LEO.
Possible explanation for the hand waving:
I love AI and I subscribe to maximum, unbounded scale.
He knows the promo rate on the maximum, unbounded scale subscription is gonna run out eventually, right?
“Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek.”
Somebody wrote an article that seems to be especially designed to piss people like us off. https://testdouble.com/insights/anyone-can-code-software-is-having-its-ratatouille-moment
I saw it and I’m spreading my pain around. (As an additional bonus, the site jumps back upwards in the text for me constantly).
Dave Mosher is a Principal Consultant at Test Double, and has experience in legacy modernization, agentic coding, and explaining CORS poorly to people who didn’t ask.
What legitimate experience does he possess? I can only assume legacy modernization means throw spaghetti microservice buzzword architecture at the client. And he admits he doesn’t really know CORS. I see these blogs about how LLMs are so much better than humans for programming yet never written by someone who has put together anything more complex and bigger scale than their myspace page in '05.
Oh god, I’d be so happy to see these people prove their point by actually shipping stuff that works instead of sitting in the corner throwing insults at how everyone else is dumb and are going to be left behind any day now.
Not even one paragraph in and I already see an “it’s not X, its Y”.
When I look at the cast, I don’t just see a rat and a bunch of chefs. I see the archetypes of our modern tech landscape
@e8d79 @Soyweiser already missed one 🥴
John Scalzi:
I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.
Purdue mandating AI to graduate: https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/2025/Q4/purdue-unveils-comprehensive-ai-strategy-trustees-approve-ai-working-competency-graduation-requirement/
I’m looking for the actual curricula / docs signed off by the trustees. Looks like another domino falls.
I learned yesterday that Helsinki’s uni is also on the list: prompts not only tolerated, but encouraged
been starting to wonder whether these are like the google etc plays there: “suuuuure you can get a sweetheart deal for our systems” [5y later and much storage on the expensive rentabox] “hey btw we’re renewing prices, your contracts are going up 400%. oh and also taking data out of the system is $20/TB. just…in case you wanted to try”
Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.
Translation: somebody’s getting paid off
🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶
Boilermakers gonna boil water i guess
https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism
Throughout my nearly three decades in family medicine across a busy rural region, I watched the system become increasingly burdened by administrative requirements and workflow friction. The profession I loved was losing time and attention to tasks that did not require a medical degree. That tension created a realization that has guided my work ever since: If physicians do not lead the integration of AI into clinical practice, someone else will. And if they do, the result will be a weaker version of care.
I feel for him, but MAYBE this isn’t a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have “led” on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldn’t need to “lead” on AI now? I’m sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI won’t make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.
Why do they think they are going to have any input in genAI development either way?
Anyway seeing a previous wave of shit burden you with a lot of unrelated work after deployment isnt the best reason to now start burdening yourself with a lot of unrelated work before the new wave of shot is here. But sure good luck learning how LLMs work mathematically Kevin.
Why is my home directory gone Claude?
See that ~/ at the end? That’s your entire home directory.
This just keeps happening…
@e8d79 @BlueMonday1984 is this even reversible?
Assuming that, and Apple makes it real easy, you have a Time Machine backup: Yes, of course!Sir a NaNth deletion has hit the home directory.
Oh god, reddit is now turning comments into links to search for other comments and posts that include the same terms or phrases.
it shows up only when logged out
A few people on bsky were claiming that at least reddit is still good re the AI crappification, and they have no idea what is coming.
I wonder when those people started using reddit. I started in 2012 and it already felt like a completely different (and generally worse) experience several times over before the great API fiasco.
Yeah, it also has an element of ‘it is one of the few words you can add to search engines which give you a hope of a good result’ and not regular users who see the shit, or got offered nfts.
You see, tilde marks old versions of files, so Claude actually made you a favour by freeing some disk space
……snrk
iykyk. this comment is sublime
i would say “backups” but these kind of people don’t do backups. either way nothing of value was lost
~/? More like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is old news but I just stumbled across this fawning 2020 Elon Musk interview / award ceremony on the social medias and had to share it: https://www.youtube.com/live/AF2HXId2Xhg?t=2109
It it Musk claims synthetic mRNA (and/or DNA) will be able to do anything and it is like a computer program, and that stopping aging probably wouldn’t be too crazy. And that you could turn someone into a freakin’ butterfly if you want to with the right DNA sequence.
this is not even wrong lol
It certainly comes across a little different when said by someone who thinks cisgender is a slur and that changing one’s sex is some sort of great moral evil.
Turning into a butterfly is a cool sci-fi future but those trans people are a bridge too far.
Also like it’s just hard to listen to, being drug hazed ramblings-- I want some actually fun sci-fi speeches!
Semi-related, the SF author John Varley died the other day, and I remember how both transgressive and cool it was that his characters in Steel Beach and others could change gender basically at will. (Banks ripped this off in the Culture btw). I don’t think he had a special insight into the lived experience of trans people, but at least he embraced the idea as part of humanity’s future, not recoil from it like later epigones.
Michael Swanwick mini-obit: https://floggingbabel.blogspot.com/2025/12/john-varley-1947-2025.html
HN on Varley: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46269991
He was doing the easy sex-swapping thing in The Ophiuchi Hotline, several years before Steel Beach.
This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.
And just think, he’s been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.
be elon musk
binge ket, adderall, and ST: Voyager one weekend
burst into monday morning SpaceX board meeting after 3 nights of no sleep
crash into table
get a nasty wound on scalp
it’s bleeding pretty bad
stand atop board room table and shout “We must RETVRN TO AMPHIVIAN”
also we’re nameing the next crew Dragon capsule “Admiral Janeway”
everybody claps
Tesla stock goes up
Threshold was best episode imo.
There’s a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.
For the love of god please hook me up.
Much like when the Voyager passed warp 13, our AI development is moving too fast with potentially magnitudinous consequences.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-Extensions-Block-AI
Now they just need to add a slider for touchpad scroll speed.
