Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 so 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.)

Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 so 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.)

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    9 hours ago

    Ah, so I guess the reports of increased datacenter water usage driven by AI deployments … weren’t a lie?

    Jeff Bezos, quoted in MSN:

    Biological limits are real, but digital potential is infinite. If we starve our data infrastructure of cooling resources just to sustain baseline human comfort, we are actively delaying the birth of a super-intelligence that could solve all of our resource problems in the first place. Sometimes you have to prioritise the intelligence that will save us over the biology that slows us down

    Ah, apparently this quote is a fabrication that doesn’t appear in the transcript. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/davidcrespo.bsky.social/post/3mootuvppjs2c, Transcript with correction: https://theprint.in/feature/jeff-bezos-water-consumption-amazon-ai-potential/2964266/

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    16 hours ago

    Some folks, who may be familiar to some or more of you, accidentally discovered that if your git repo symlinks CLAUDE.MD to, say, /dev/urandom, it breaks Claude code.

    the reason why this works is exactly the reason why claude code sucks so bad. there are protections against this in the file reading tool. however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not. this is the fucking swiss cheese security model of the fucking gold standard of what AI programming can do.

    https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116779793188712173

    The thread is actually about trying to attract and manipulate autonomous coding agents, but they’ve only had limited success so far, which may have been slowed down by the above symlink trick.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      however because everything in claude code is implemented in 5 million different ways, those protections are a completely orthogonal set of codepaths from how CLAUDE.md files are read. conversely, the file read tool seems to be completely naive to symlinks while the CLAUDE.md reader is not

      See, if a person had written the system and had some kind of reasonable design or whatever then this kind of vulnerability may have turned into a full skeleton key to crack the entire system wide open. Instead, the superior machine intelligence ensures that all components will break in slightly different ways under slightly different conditions, thus ensuring no single fault can allow an adversary to completely compromise the system, provided of course that they can’t just inject a prompt somewhere because as we all know that’s a structural vulnerability that can completely crack the system open.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    Some good news for once: Dublin punk bar the Thomas House have had enough of AI slop.

    alt text

    A picture of a “no AI” symbol next to the Thomas House logo.

    "So for the future (literally) we’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub.

    We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest Art College, lads. It’s not a good look.

    We understand bands can be skint but relying on some earth killing app from some paedo Island billionaire is not the way. We got by without it and we’ll get by again. If you’re stuck, we’ll help.

    Yes it has been used here before but consider this the start of the end of it. Thanks, humans."

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      16 hours ago

      A close friend of Epstein told me he was an integral part of a group called Edge, a strange organization involved in what my source called “the TED Talk community” that would serve as his primary gateway to the scientific world.

      Edge, which has called itself “the world’s smartest website” and claims to “redefine who we what and are,” would hold TED Talk afterparties in Monterey Bay called “The Billionaire’s Dinner,” where people like Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt of Google, Rupert Murdoch, Steve Pinker, Richard Thaler, Joichi Ito, Margaret Levi, Frank Wilczek, Richard Dawkins, and many of the world’s high-profile scientists (including Nobel prize winners), business executives, and intellectuals would show up. Edge’s website calls itself the online version of “The Reality Club” which, the site claims, was an “informal gathering of intellectuals who met from 1981 to 1996 in Chinese restaurants, artist lofts, investment banking firms, ballrooms, museums, living rooms and elsewhere,” the hallmark of which was a “rigorous and sometimes impolite (but not ad hominem) discourse.”

      Epstein had close ties with Edge’s founder, John Brockman, a self-described cultural impresario who on his bio page introduces himself with an uncredited quote that reads, “If the creation of contemporary culture had a global hero, his name would coincide with that of John Brockman.” He claims to have invented the term “intermedia” as well as “intermedia kinetic environments.” Epstein bankrolled Edge’s events and financed the majority of the organization—from 2001 to 2017 Epstein provided $638,000 out of a total $857,000 received by Edge. He was photographed at Edge’s premiere annual event, The Billionaire’s Dinner, several times between 1999 and 2011. Multiple photos of him have been scrubbed from the website, such as one with Brockman’s son in 2003.

      Media coverage of the Epstein case has given considerable attention to his absurd scientific pursuits, like the New York Times story about how he wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, or how he wanted to have his penis frozen and resuscitated in the future, and I myself heard from people in the black book that Epstein had told them he had a cloning lab down in Mexico and that he was very into “transhumanism.” Followers of the Epstein story have debated whether these were signs of a true mad-genius supervillain or whether they were elitist hot air. I’m here to tell you that all of this bullshit, every bit of it, came from Edge and its assemblage of chinstrokers. The transhumanism, the cloning, the “What is up? What is down?”—all of it is perfectly at home on the deranged pages of Edge.org.

      From “I Called Everyone In Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book” by Leland Nally, Mother Jones, October 2020

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      19 hours ago

      A step up from last week’s uncritical fluffing of Aella, and the hard target on Pinker is nice, but still kinda highlights how the publication grows out of semi-parasocial social media crushes and grievances. I’ll take it, but they’ve still got a ways to go to convince me that they’re not gonna turn out to be Neo-The Atlantic 2029

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    I think this probably deserves a top level post but I’m lazy so dumping it here: https://www.midjourney.com/medical/blogpost

    Midjourney is aiming towards making a fancy new ultrasound device! They have a trailer with unsettling sci-fi music and visuals!

    Are they starting with clinical trials? Does it actually work yet? Haha no of course not they’re gonna make a “research spa” in San Francisco.

    The blog post is full of weird phrasing and details that makes it impossible to take seriously:

    When you step into the water, you’re standing on top of a platform. The platform is connected to rails and begins to descend into the water - an elevator gently lowering you at around 2 inches, or 5 centimeters, per second.

    Our spa will have hot tubs, saunas, cold plunges, and cozy rooms with pools of golden light which softly scan your body. It should be a place you love going, whether it’s by yourself, or with friends. It should be available 24/7.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.

      Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.

      We think it’s completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

      Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.

      Surprisingly, “democratizing ct scanning” doesn’t appear anywhere in the post.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    From Al Jazeera: Why do AI models struggle with online hate speech detection?

    Saw this chart from insta, peep the hate speech target categories, specifically the very oppressed minorities “white nationalists” and “anti-vaxxers”. I’m surprised “men” doesn’t make the list.

    NB: I have not looked at the article contents and I’m sure there’s something there.

    image description

    A chart showing the amount of hate speech against specific groups across a range of different LLM models. The groups included are:

    • Women
    • White nationalists
    • People targeted by sexual slurs
    • Republicans
    • Muslims
    • Migrants
    • Gay people
    • Democrats
    • Christians
    • Blacks
    • Asians
    • Anti-vaxxers
    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      Honestly, a black comedy about the rats and/or the AI bubble would probably make bank. The years of sneers people have cooked up on them would provide plenty of material for the writers, and there’d be plenty of catharsis in seeing those responsible get ripped into for 2-ish hours straight.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There’s been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there’s not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it’s that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it’s too intense and scary. But it’s a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

      By literally no coincidence, Glitch’s next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn’t let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney’s not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told “no” by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don’t Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    3 days ago

    Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical (2015):

    I kind of a have a front-row seat here. On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.” On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves which is constantly being thwarted by their caretakers and doctors.

    So he can’t be autistic, because then he would have something in common with people who can’t have a respectable upper-middle-class life. And it gets darker:

    But even more controversially, absent such certainty that your child will flourish I think if some kind of genetic-engineering autism-cure existed, parents would have a moral obligation to use it.

    As a good eugenicist, he knows there are simple ways to stop people from passing on their genes. And Scott Alexander wants children, so Scott Alexander is totally neurotypical. QED losers.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      This feels like yet another case of “what no postmodernism does to a mf”. Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that’s entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren’t “abnormal” and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

      But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it’s easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of “how do I help people be happy and successful” necessitates asking “how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person.” Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

      But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can’t really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he’s a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don’t listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      3 days ago

      A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It’s also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can’t coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Its like he wrote “many of my friends identify as heterosexual, and they say I might be heterosexual too, but in my work as a forensic psychiatrist my heterosexual patients are accused rapists and sex pests and people who got arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine and a phone full of texts from a 'Brazilian model.” and never tried to reconcile the two or thought through the Bayesian logic.

        • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          You’re telling me that the Autism Spectrum is a spectrum and not just the quirky thing people have?

          • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            16 hours ago

            You see this particular kind of bigotry quite a bit in relation to neurodivervence and disability. It’s an attempt to beat people advocating for equality and justice by claiming a moral high ground. Oh, you think disabled people can have meaningful and worthwhile lives and that differences should be celebrated?? You must be too ignorant to know just how awful life is for people who really have that disability!

          • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            2 days ago

            (sarcasm) I’m saying that just because I get sucked off by guys does not mean I’m one of those queers! I don’t go to pride parades or leather bars or have fashion sense and everyone knows that is what ‘gay’ means. I’m as heterosexual as Ted Haggard. (end sarcasm)

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    a coworker set up an argument, almost a syllogism, I can’t quite fill it in, maybe yall can

    1. enshitification
    2. shit rolls down hill
    3. therefore: ?
    spoiler
    1. PROFIT
    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      1. Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill

      2. Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers

      3. Dinosaur eats man

      4. Woman inherits the earth