Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.)
the talking point about disparaging terms for AI users by choice “I came up with a racist-sounding term for AI users, so if you say ‘clanker’ you must be a racist” is so fucking stupid it’s gotta be some sort of op
(esp when the made-up racist-sounding term turns out to have originated with Warren fucking Ellis)
i am extremely disappointed that awful systems users have fallen for it for a moment
Side note: The way I’ve seen clanker used has been for the AIs themselves, not their users. I’ve mostly seen the term in the context of star wars memers eager to put their anti-droid memes and jokes to IRL usage.
Same here, I’ve never actually seen the term “clanker” be used in reference to a person using the AI, but the AI itself. Which to me was analogous to going to an expensive bakery and accusing the bread of ripping you off instead of the baker (or whoever was setting prices, which wouldn’t be the bread).
If there was any sort of op going on (which I don’t think there is), I’d guess it would be from the AI doomers who want people to think of these things as things with enough self-awareness that something like “clanker” would actually insult them (but, again, probably not, IMO).
Slightly related to the ‘it is an op’ thing, did you look at the history of the wikipedia page for clanker? There were 3 edits to the page before 1 June 2025.
The truth is that we feel shame to a much greater degree than the other side, which makes it pretty easy to divide us on these annoying trivialities.
My personal hatred of tone policing is greater than my sense of shame, but I imagine that isnt something to expect for most.
Accidentally posted in an old thread:
Nice result, not too shocking after IMO performance. A friend of mind told me that this particular competition is highly time constrained for human competitors, i.e., questions aren’t impossibly difficult per se, but some are time sinks that you simply avoid to get points elsewhere. (5 hours on 12 Qs is tight…)
So when you are competing against a data center using a nuclear reactor vs 3 humans running on broccoli, the claims of superhuman performance definitely require an * attached to them.
Also accidentally posted in an old thread:
Hot take: If a text extruder’s winning gold medals at your contest, that’s not a sign the text extruder’s good at something, that’s a sign your contest is worthless for determining skill.
Pretty sure I’ve heard similar things about AI “art” vs artists as well.
Math competitions need to start assigning problems that require counting the letters in fruit names.
Word problems referring to aliens from cartoons. “Bobbby on planet Glorxon has four Strawberies, which are similar to but distinct from earth strawberries, and Kleelax has seven…”
I also wonder if you could create context breaks, or if they’ve hit a point where that isn’t as much of a factor. "A train leaves Athens, KY traveling at 45 mph. Another train leaves Paris, FL traveling at 50 mph. If the track is 500 miles long, how long is a train trip from Athens to Paris?
LLM’s ability to fake solving word problems hinges on being able to crib the answer, so using aliens from cartoons (or automatically-generating random names for objects/characters) will prove highly effective until AI corps can get the answers into their training data.
As for context breaks, those will remain highly effective against LLMs pretty much forever - successfully working around a context break requires reasoning, which LLMs are categorically incapable of doing.
Constantly and subtly twiddling with questions (ideally through automatic means) should prove effective as well - Apple got “reasoning” text extruders to flounder and fail at simple logic puzzles through such a method.
Sorry, what is a “context break”?
Does anyone have a good definition or classic examples for the term mall ninja at the ready?
I first heard that term on this channel, and I feel like I should understand that phenomenon better.
clueless and enthusiastic (often overly so), getting real into something but often at the lower end rungs
aiui the term it started its life as a description of people who’d get real into weapons, but only at the grade you can buy in mall mass retail. never dug into the history tho
I feel that strip mall dojos where you were ostensibly taught some very mainstream belt-based martial art like karate or TKD (or straight up make-believe stuff like ninjutsu) but were essentially glorified daycare should figure somewhere in the history of the term.
It also comes from a mall cop (a very USA sort of concept) who was extremely afraid of getting shot at his job (more so than regular cops at the time) and who overreacted massively and wanted all kinds of weird gun attachments iirc. Sadly this paranoia is something that the US cops also suffer from now. Causing everybody to suffer.
This is (a copy of) the original Mall Ninja thread from decades ago, featuring “the Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas”.
https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/
Fair warning: you will leave the site both enlightened and nearly dead of cringe.
this post extremely quickly goes many places I didn’t come close to expecting
impressive.
The classics are classic for a reason.
I like that whoever wrote this initially had a wife in their fantasy life. The wife stops getting mentioned like two posts in. I want a full reboot of this series based on her life
Thank you for sharing this bit of internet deep lore. Now I just need to find the four hour youtube video of some ex-GI gun nut explaining in exhausting detail exactly how bullshit every detail of those stories is because whatever the fuck is going on there is fascinating.
Median age is usually 19-25
Good news, now they’re 40-50 and severely divorced!
Quick PSA for anyone who’s still on LinkedIn: the site’s stealing your data to train the slop machines
That reminds me I still need to wipe my reddit an twitter archives. Wonder if wiping it all in one go would cause more trouble for them, or if deleting it slowly (or overwriting with random words in the case of reddit) causes more changes in the datasets and messes with them more like that.
I for one don’t mind if my reddit crap poisons future LLMs.
I just don’t want to be used and surveilled. Still need to get this shirt
Haha Standplaats moves fast.
from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a “give us your actual phone number” thing even before felon took it over…
so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again
not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno
[0] - …well, 4 years ago, “had”. probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn’t get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon’s mania to rebrand it to “x” overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)
[1] - when going through the “your interests” list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you’d hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow
Yeah, I figured I would need some web automation script for that, I have looked into them in the past, but never gotten far with it before something else was more important. Still silly that is needed and will hit the servers harder than an API would. Just strange priorities.
When I looked at ‘your interests’ in the past it was so incredibly wrong I resisted the urge to update it because I though ‘sure if that is what you think is important to me fine’. Gotta make sure the basilisk can’t simulate you ;).
Ratelimits would be the big worry, heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand. And the whole like system is broken anyway. If you remove enough of them by hand you get in the situation where tweets show in your list but they do not look like they were liked by that account. (I always had the suspicion the whole likes system, which people got mad over a lot is badly implemented anyway, and that explains the weirdness people saw, a thing this story seems to confirm).
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that. (Not sure I can even find the list anymore anyway or at least a complete list, mine always stopped after 100 accounts or so, while I block a few more than that).
heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.
yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited
you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm… open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn’t have to do everything in minutes
I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that
probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don’t have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho
The racism machine does a racism: AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities
LLVM is having a discussion on how to handle vibe coders attacking the project, and its causing Discoursetm on the red site.
If Yud and Soares are on a book tour I want them to go on hot ones
Forgive my stupidity, but I don’t know what this means. Or it’s referencing something I don’t know.
All is forgiven. Hot Ones is an internet interview show. Its core premise is that the host and interviewee conduct their interview while eating increasingly spicier chicken wings. As with any interview platform, it’s a common stop for public figures to hit up, especially on PR tours.
The show has a reputation for researching its guests well and asking insightful/deep questions. There’s also an element to it where, for some guests, as they experience spicier wings, they are unable to keep up whatever facade or persona they usually keep up in interviews.
I wasn’t making any profound commentary; I want to see Yud in pain while trying to explain alignment.
it would be incredible if yud’s one of the types to lose his focus around sauce 3, would do a real kicker to the shine of his grift
It’s only fair that his audience shouldn’t be the only ones suffering when that happens.
Thanks.
TBF I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of watching Yudkowsky eat spicy wings while also arguing with someone.
YouTube interview show where the interviewee is fed hot-sauce coated chicken wings of escalating spiciness
As an aside, my personal tolerance is such that if I ever go on there, I’m going to end up bankrupting the fuckers
someday™ I’ll get around to looking into getting a season pack from the states to here (which possibly might be distinctly non-trivial, and if it is I’ll have bother trying to figure out the logistics of it, which ugh)
An example from a local Nashville institution:
https://www.400degreeshotchicken.com/s/order?item=77#14
I’d gladly help you out with it!
will keep the offer in mind when I have the spoons and round tuits for it :)
Well, I have had some of their hot sauces before and can confirm that they are not bad to pretty good, and are at a good gift sort of price point (if you live in the US).
Many of our favorute people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.
Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.
Have they ever discussed how much they take on average?
Creative applications for stimulants comesup pretty frequently in techie discussions of nootropics and “stacks” thereof.
This is about as techie as I go as far as internet communities haha.
Doing my screaming into the void offtopic thing, but the Dutch parliament, consisting of the the liberal VVD all the far right (PVV, FVP, JA21) and half the extreme christian (but not far) right (SGP the reformed/protestants (*)) , and the conspiratorial partially far right farmers party (BBB) accepted a motion by the far right to declare antifa a terrorist organization.
Congrats to everybody here now being terrorists in the eyes of the Dutch gov. Ah the joys of living in an American colony.
*: Even less relevant to this sub, but perhaps interesting, did you know we have a so called bible belt in the Netherlands? See this wiki page and look at the voting results graph. (while there is no direct graph our second very christian party (The CU who often also votes with them (but didn’t this time because they are not that extreme) also generally gets their votes from this area. What makes this downright weird is that these voters are basically from our rural areas, but on the line that historically splits between protestantism and catholicism. But all these votes are more from the protestant side. Some sociologists prob could/can have written some interesting papers on that. So it can’t just be explained by pillarisation. Hope you enjoyed my random scream into the void which I tried to make somewhat interesting about our weird political situation.
Fresh of the press, only in german unfortunately: tagesschau
President of bavaria (and head of the extra fashy bavarian splinter party of the christian conservatives) wants to cut 10.000 public service jobs using AI.
All Söder does is spew bullshit and post bad tiktoks.
Hold on, we might just have found the first job LLMs actually can replace.
OK. So, this next thing is pretty much completely out of the sneerosphere, but it pattern matches to what we’re used to looking at: a self-styled “science communicator” mansplaining a topic they only have a reductive understanding of: Hank Green gets called out for bad knitting video
I mean if it gets too hot he could try the traditional fiber arts dodge for internet hate and fake his own death.
What’s up with all the websites that tell me “you’ve reached the limit of free articles for the month” even though I’ve literally never entered that site before in my life. Stop gaslighting me you cunts.
Anyway, here’s the archive
The limit is zero, that’s all.
I disabled javascript and the popup went away
TIL Hank Green, the milquetoast BlueSky poster, also has some YouTube channel. How quaint.
I think every time I learn That Guy From BlueSky also has some other gig different from posting silly memes I lose some respect for them.
E.g. I thought Mark Cuban was just a dumb libertarian shitposter, but then it turned out he has a cuntillion dollars and also participated in a show unironically called “Shark Tank” that I still don’t 100% believe was a real thing because by god
I figured he’d be a lot better known for his YouTube career than for his bsky posting. I see his stuff all the time in my recommendations, though his style isn’t my cup of tea so I seldom watch any of them.
I haven’t seen the YouTube recommendation page in so long I wouldn’t know. Invidious my beloved <3
Some of our younger readers might not be fully inoculated against high-control language. Fortunately, cult analyst Amanda Montell is on Crash Course this week with a 45min lecture introducing the dynamics of cult linguistics. For example, describing Synanon attack therapy, Youtube comments, doomscrolling, and maybe a familiar watering hole or two:
You know when people can’t stop posting negative or conspiratorial comments, thinking they’re calling someone out for some moral infraction, when really they’re just aiming for clout and maybe catharsis?
Cultish and Magical Overthinking are top shelf.
A second trashfire has hit the Ruby language - RubyGems was hit with a hostile takeover from Ruby Central, seemingly to squash an attempt at putting together an official governance policy.
Between that and DHH’s fascist screed, its not been a good week for Ruby.
Wonder if, esp considering the DHH situations this is sort of a nazi bar style takeover. Where the people who don’t want to make a fuss let in the nice but iffy people who then go mask off, and let the rest in. (The thing the far right accused the left of doing, in a bit of projections). But I know nothing about the politics of anybody involved, could also just be a regular hostile takeover.
(Doesn’t feel like one just looking at the rubycentral bsky account for a second though. They do have an amazing spin on it. It was to protect against supply chain attacks (also a link to an email article of them, which just feels weird)).
ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time
I haven’t been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can’t speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven’t really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but… yeah
ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time
I had to look it up, the Rails Conf code like a porn star thing was 2009, I didn’t hallucinate it. DHH has deleted those tweets.
I feel old now.
They do have an amazing spin on it. It was to protect against supply chain attacks
We at least got to see a well-aimed sneer in response:
Another sneer on the subject: https://bsky.app/profile/tef.bsky.social/post/3lz7fdou4uk2y
"In case you’re not sure who dhh is, he’s a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like “i am smarter than you” and “foreigners bad”
rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast"
Followup by somebody else:
“I posted here about him driving at Le Mans in 2024, and several people told me that he’s disliked and mocked as much in the motorsport community as he is in the tech community.”
“rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast”
Got a pretty fitting post just up the thread:
anyway it turns out i spoke too soon: enough people have already stepped down to the point where dhh is now paying to keep the lights on
so the answer is “the only people left are paid to be there, everyone else walked away”
“Two friends short of a podcast” is the single most powerful burn I’ve seen in quite some time.
Angela Collier: Dyson spheres are a joke.
spoiler
Turns out Dyson agreed.
thanks for linking this, was fun to watch
hadn’t seen that saltman clip (been real busy running around pretty afk the last few weeks), but it’s a work of art. despite grokking the dynamics, it continues to be astounding just how vast the gulf between fact and market vibes are
and as usual, Collier does a fantastic job ripping the whole idea a new one in a most comprehensive manner
“Enjoy” this Rat fundamentally misunderstanding Banks:
https://www.boristhebrave.com/2025/09/14/the-culture-novels-as-a-dystopia/
“let me be really brave and unique: let’s imagine culture is how the azadians (or veppers, or the affront, or even the gfcf…) see them. let’s ignore the basic fact that this misconception is the main reason why culture’s opponents, ultimately, lose. i am very intelligent.”
oh, and let’s entirely ignore “consider phlebas”…
But one of my hobbies is “oppositional reading” – deliberately interpreting novels counter to the obvious / intended reading.
Proceeds to just make new things up and misunderstand inconsequential aspects of things that were already there
I view all the books through a in-universe lens and thus will not consider that things are as they are because the narrative needs it
But then they can’t imagine a large population having, largely, some traits in common due to cultural mechanisms rather than genetic engineering, and conclude that this fiction contains elements because their narrative of the world needs it. Amazing.
I should know the answer to this because I re-read all the Culture novels last year, but I do think there’s some genetic engineering in the Culture. There’s the famous sex glands, of course (but maybe the neural net handles part of that too?) and then there’s the asocial dude on the remote asteroid in Excession, who I believe was seen as a genetic throwback from the general population.
But it’s beside the point, Banks probably included genetic engineering to make sure no-one got horrible diseases and could live to 500 years, not to breed a separate race of elites. And for that he can never be forgiven by these idiots.
Edit both HN and LW comments mention John C Wright, who I have never read and vaguely remembered being a Sad Puppy. He has some dreck where everything is libertarian. Banks was a socialist, but he was foremost a novelist. Faced with the need to create a future society, he naturally designed one with no disease, no material wants, and lots and lots of sex. Who wouldn’t? Conservative yanks, that’s who.
“Why didn’t Iain take my neuroses into account??”
Yes, why didn’t he take the neuroses of normal people into account. Normal people who spend 90% of their day worrying about the acausalrobotgod killing everybody.
Strikes me as they simply have never talked to normal people about immortality like that, even in a post scarcity world, lot of people simply don’t feel like it would be worth their time to live forever in that.
