- 19 Posts
- 644 Comments
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
2·7 days agoI’d go for Motoko Kusanagi’s prosthetic body, myself, as long as I could afford the upkeep. That whole “don’t darken your Soul Gem” thing would go terribly for me.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Oxford pretends AI benchmarks are science, not marketingEnglish
9·9 days agoWhatever marginal utility genAI has in mathematics, like being a shitty version of a semantic search engine, is outweighed by the damage it is doing to critical thought at large. “Ooh, the bus to the math conference runs so smoothly on this leaded gasoline!”
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Oxford pretends AI benchmarks are science, not marketingEnglish
14·9 days agoReasoning With Machines doesn’t work on reasoning, really. It’s almost entirely large language models — chatbots. Because that’s where the money — sorry, the industry interest — is. But this paper got into the NeurIPS 2025 conference.
A reminder that the NeurIPS FAQ for reviewers says that “interactions with LLMs” are an acceptable way “to enhance your understanding of certain concepts”. What other big conferences are there… AAAI 2026, you say?
AAAI-26 will follow a two-phase reviewing process as in previous years, with two additions: an additional AI-generated review in Phase 1, and an AI-generated summary of the discussions at the end of the discussion phase. The AI-generated content is being used as part of a pilot program to evaluate the ability of AI tools to assist in the peer review process.
I’m gonna say it: The entire “artificial intelligence”/“machine learning” research field is corrupt. They have institutionally accepted the bullshit fountain as a tool. It doesn’t matter if they’re only using chatbots as a “pilot program”; they’ve bought into the ideology. They’ve granted fashtech a seat at the bar and forced all the other customers to shake its hand.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
7·10 days agoHow do you write like this?
The first step is not to have an editor. The second step is to marinate for nearly two decades in a cult growth medium that venerates you for not having an editor.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•MIT releases, then quietly removes, nonsense AI cybersecurity paperEnglish
24·12 days agoThe only nice feeling here is that of every joke we science students made about the management school being validated.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th November 2025English
11·12 days agomuted colors
A lot of it looks like it was pissed on.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025English
12·14 days agoThe computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they can’t put up with all your shit any more.
arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025English
11·16 days ago“I can read HTML but not CSS” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2021 (and since apparently scrubbed from the Internet, to live only in the sneers of fond memory)
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025English
9·18 days agoOreo: the cookie that doesn’t need a marketing department.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025English
10·19 days agoThat post requires signing in to view; it’s a link to this: https://futurism.com/science-energy/trump-altman-plutonium-oklo
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025English
8·22 days agoLevel design, color palette, continuity, assets and physics by a bowl of salvia
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•the code smells of fashtech: omarchyEnglish
7·22 days agoDo you remember / Unending and boundless September / Flames were catchin’ the threads of the first-years
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•the code smells of fashtech: omarchyEnglish
15·22 days agoIt is 1998, and I am reading Internet posts complaining about Mac users
It is 2005, and I am reading Internet posts complaining about Mac users
It is 2025, and I am reading Internet posts complaining about Mac users
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025English
27·24 days agoAll participants in the Stubsack, including awful.systems regulars and those joining from elsewhere, are reminded that this is not debate club. Anyone tempted by the possibility of debate-club behavior is encouraged to touch your nearest grass immediately. We are here to sneer, not to bicker: This is a place to mock the outside world, not to settle grand matters of ideology, unless the latter is done in an extraordinarily amusing way.
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025English
6·24 days agoI believe those sentences can be paraphrased as, “The term entire function is only used in complex analysis. The function f(z) = z^2 + 1 is zero at z = i.”
blakestacey@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025English
14·24 days agoNew research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested. […] 45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
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31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
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20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
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Gemini performed worst with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to its poor sourcing performance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2025/new-ebu-research-ai-assistants-news-content
And yet the BBC still has a Programme Director for “Generative AI” who gets trotted out to say “We want these tools to succeed”. No, we don’t, you blithering bellend.
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I still say that the term “scientific racism” gives these fuckos too much credit. I’ve been saying “numberwang racism” instead.