Want to wade into the sandy, 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. The spooks are well underway.)
For people who use firefox:
browser.nova.enabled = false in your about config gets rid of the corners.
I thought they already got rid of the corners 🤔
Saw a matte green Tesla with a late 2024 registration plate and a bumper sticker saying “I bought this before we knew Elon was nuts”
My man, in 2024 musk had already destroyed twitter, was already promoting the far right AfD party in germany, Tommy Robinson in the uk, bribing voters for Trump in swing states, talking about what DOGE would do when Trump won the election… Like why bother with the pretense?
TBF I was visiting the south coast of the UK a few miles away from the recent Balaklava protests over migrants in dinghies so perhaps none of the above qualify as “nuts” from this particular genius’ perspective.
What a tool.
Elon did his ‘oops I did an antisemitism’ tour in jan 2024, so indeed. (Also really dire to hear that tour from the side of the survivor they had talked into joining, also note Elons ‘anti sniper’ shield he is carrying around his neck).
I remember the day my very last bit of grudging engineering respect counterweighting my disdain for the man left my body. October 2017, the day he claimed on a big presentation that Starship would bankrupt airliners by flying 1000 people per ship between world cities several times a day.
Since, it is incredibly interesting how any time he is given free reign things go off the rails. The Falcon rocket program and the Starship program are so diametrically opposed in their design philosophies and ways they are run it is amazing.
I saw a Cybertruck yesterday that was painted bright green. I did not think there was a way to make those things any uglier, but I guess I was wrong.
Utah will become first state to let AI examine patients and prescribe medication without direct human oversight h/t naked capitalism
silicon slopes takes the lead for yolo healthcare.
riddle me this, rationalists: when the insurance bots deny the claims, am I for or against that?
Famous mathematician Terry Tao has published slides for “Math 2.0”, a talk where he discusses how mathematics and chatbots can integrate. I suspect that Dr. Tao has fucking lost it. I don’t know how far the chatbots have misled him vs. how much of this is his unawareness of non-number-theoretic maths, but his “ablation studies” and “neighborhood of a theorem” are already studied in reverse maths, and chatbots have not lowered the complexity of proof search, so there’s not really a sense in which chatbots replace any of the proof-oriented parts of practicing mathematics, regardless of the quality of what they say.
Related: a doctor who denied COVID-19 vaccine efficacy (and thus should not be trusted) has chimed in to say that Dr. Tao doesn’t understand cancer research; in particular, he doesn’t understand that (1) we already throw a bunch of chemicals at the wall to see what’s effective, and (2) terminal cancer patients rarely hesitate to sign up for human-challenge trials and experimental pretrials, on account of having decreasingly little to lose. The orange-site commentariat have several similar complaints about Dr. Tao’s position.
Tao is on fedi; a polite (because this is professional business) reply on Masto pointing out relevant earlier research would probably benefit the community discussions.
before LLMs, auto-captions on Youtube used to be particularly terrible for Japanese. but thanks to the power of Gemini and very energy-intensive, biosphere-destroying giant datacenters, the captions now have become worse than ever.
like I was watching a jidaigeki and the captions kept rephrasing stuff—in addition to the previous class of sound-based error, e.g. saying 行きます when a character is dramatically telling the other to stay alive (生きます), so it sounds like they’re fucking off and running away—which continues to happen like before, Youtube now has brand new and exciting types of error, like, bizarrely, captioning 誇り as プライド, or 冗談じゃないぞ as ゲームじゃないよ. In a jidaigeki. Presumably when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu is taking a break from playing Mario no Super Picross in his Edo-period Super Famicom
Oh god, are they … translating to english and back again??
SpaceX gives $1.5m in fascist slop tokens to DHH’s dotfiles. I don’t even know.
https://omarchy.org/news/2026/10/spacexai-joins-as-founding-corporate-patron/
We’re closing in on 7,000 pull requests from more than 550 contributors, and every one of them deserves a proper look. That’s not a job for mere humans!
I’m lowkirkenuinely curious where this will lead.
Every one deserves a proper look! … but we’ll do slop reviews instead.
Weiner Von Wrong, creator of the nouveau Hitler Limo, funding yet another fascist?
Dont you know? Racist developers will solve the toxic ground on Mars.
Musk and DHH are both incompetent fascists, they were made for each other
Just got this recommended to me haven’t watched it yet but already let out a sigh
Edit: just watched a little bit of it-its about the HuggingFace hack. sighhhhh
Spotted this the day it came out. It’s largely reporting Dwarkesh Patel’s blog post about the different “civilisations” of agents as if it were fact.
Very disappointed in Kurzgesagt who previously seemed pretty “with it”. But then, as someone with a formal background in compsci, stats, NLP and machine learning, perhaps this is Gell-Mann Amnesia/Knoll’s Law of Media literacy at work…
They had a couple of videos openly sponsored by effective altruists a while ago. Could be they are still downstream of EA money, or they got audience captured because pretending the inevitable scifi future is just around the corner comes with a built in audience.
They also were a mouthpiece for self driving car hype for a while.
“We’ve added a prohibition on sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models,” Anthropic’s update reads.
If they want to moderate the user generated content posted to their internet platform, that’s fine with me, but then they should forfeit the DMCA safe harbor for their plagiarism machine as well.
It’s now titled “Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes,”
Well what the fuck do they think their whole leadership team has been doing in Washington these last eight months?
Oh my god is it in response to that AI torture chamber?
gotta be right?
Glyph’s recently sneered his fellow programmers’ enthusiastic acceptance of the slop machines - recommend checking it out.
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
Now it seems like a lot of meetups are all about AI, and if the topic is not AI, someone brings it up: Can AI do this, did you use AI, etc, etc.
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop
I don’t think I ever saw this. The only indication would have been a major dev org like the FSF, OSI, SFC or somebody hitting Microsoft with a really aggressive lawsuit over OpenAI. They would have had a slam dunk and it would have set the tone for the way the rest of the world reacted, I think.
Instead it was just ‘wow cool toy.’ That was when I realized the real politics of Foss wasn’t just a couple of bad actors like Eric Raymond but a full on rot.
I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
I wish I had a plan B, but I’ve devoted my life to being a software engineer and have no idea what else I could do .
It is pretty depressing.
Yeah. I’ve sort of resigned to my world being ruined and everything I ever worked on stolen and sold back to my bosses for the rest of my career.
I just wish there were some way to inflict some fraction of this pain on the people responsible, the people who go to work every day to ruin mine.
Years ago I thought, I like writing hobby software but I don’t think I would enjoy it as a career. And so, I do not work (at least directly) in software development.
If only I knew the armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabot I was dodging there.
@rhamph @EFreethought I’m glad I retired from professional software development just before LLMs came on the scene. Now I program the old-fashioned way as a hobby.
However I recently was sent an ai-generated report of bugs and vulnerabilities in one of my projects and I have to admit that it is genuinely useful.I have to admit that it is genuinely useful.
Cool testimonial bro.
If that was all GenAI was being (aggressively and incessantly) pushed as you probably wouldn’t be seeing terms like cognitive surrender and technofeudalism being thrown around as often, and this lemmy instance would still mainly be about dunking on SFBA quasireligious get-smart-quick scams.
the fuck was the point of this post
@rhamph @EFreethought I don’t think I would enjoy much of anything done for work under capitalism.
Practically everything has to compromise for profitability and exploitation.
That is no way to live or build a society.
I’ve been squeezed out of physics academia after years of ordinary career pressure and obstacles that aren’t very interesting or pertinent to this thread. The fact that the insitutions and the community have no resistance to slop, that’s why I’m not even trying to go back.
What are you doing now? I feel like after I graduate I’m gonna have to find a new field.
Writing fiction and expository material to build emotional stability while looking for the next thing to do.
Not the most encouraging answer, I know, but so it goes.
Best of luck to both of you in your searches for cleaner pastures!
@EFreethought @BlueMonday1984 not even just meetups, having dinner with programmer friends also mostly revolves around AI. Sure, some of it is talking negatively about it. But a few years ago we’d talk politics, hobbies, personal life etc. and now that’s overshadowed by AI talk. It’s just invading every space. Luckily still less so with my non-tech friends.
For a while it looked like devs would resist the slop, but now it looks like the slop is winning. It is pretty depressing. I am thinking about leaving tech altogether.
Honestly, can’t blame you - with how utterly tech’s surrendered to the slop machines, and how its actively sabotaged attempts to resist them, I’d be looking to leave as well.
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean? The AI generates a natural language proof and then supposedly generates a Lean program corresponding to the proof to verify that it’s true. There is now some troubling news about that: there are frequent examples where the statement given in natural language is different from the meaning of the Lean formalization.
The paper even points out several obvious mismatches in OpenAI’s famous Navier-Stokes solution between the English proof and the Lean formalization. There is even a spot where a 4 in the English proof turns into a 5 in the Lean proof (which causes further problems down the line). This is mostly a cosmetic error, and it doesn’t mean that the Navier-Stokes solution is wrong, but there could very well be deeper problems, especially with the English proof. At minimum, this solution absolutely requires careful review by experts. OpenAI’s behavior towards said experts has been appalling.
My viewpoint has been that the only successes that AI has had are in domains where failure is not costly (at least for someone with deep pockets), and especially when there is a formal system such as Lean that can reliably catch errors. So AI can be endlessly trained to write compiling Lean programs corresponding to formal proofs, but as soon as it runs into tasks that are not 100% bolted down, like writing the proof in English, the hallucination problem rears its ugly head. This reinforces my belief that AI is a chess engine but for Lean.
If I was treating this as a technical problem, I would say, why not just have an AI that generates the Lean proof, and at most have an optional assisting tool that translates it into English without perfect reliability? But this is not a technical problem. By outputting English proofs in the format of a research paper, OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
You know how AI proofs are supposed to be credible because of formalization with Lean?
There is another problem… apparently Lean4 hasn’t actually been fully formally verified. And in fact could have more bugs lurking in it, maybe even some foundational problems… Lesswrong post explaining the problems.
OpenAI can more easily market that their AI is intended to fully replace mathematicians, and that this is only the herald of their general superintelligence (and not that math is the only thing working out for them).
Yeah, this has been driving me crazy… reading places like hackernews or r/singularity, I keep seeing people assuming mathematicians and just bitter or engaging in sour grapes and that is why they are complaining about the “proofs” OpenAI dumped out. Like it is just some small niggling detail that the proofs can’t be read by humans and that Lean may have bugs and that some of OpenAI’s proofs have already been shown to have critical mistakes.
Edit: I had the thought to collect some links in one place Here are some more discussions on lean and autoformalization for anyone looking for good sources:
- https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/09/what-mathematicians-should-know-about-the-lean-theorem-proverquestions-of-reliability-and-ai/ a general blog post breaking down some of the bugs found and potential for more
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144 preprint discussing the problems with natural language to lean in detail and pointing out some blatant inconsistencies in the recent Navier-stokes “proof”
- /r/betteroffline discussion of above preprint: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/comments/1x0b49i/navierstokes_lost_in_translation_why_lean/
Edit 2: Made a top level post: https://awful.systems/post/9997783
Cursed: the Harry Potter franchise
Extra cursed: Harry Potter genderflip with channer lingo
Bonus cursed: An lesswrong praising the channer-lingo Harry Potter genderflip as the best thing since piss-filter Ghibli ripoffs
A chef kiss into the abyss: in the comments, the person saying, “Sounds like you’re probably not familiar with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.”
I’ve genuinely never seen anything as cringe as ‘Malfoid’. it’s basically just riding the coattails of the much better Petra Parker trend except with incel language
Someone who has never heard of fanfic and just had their mind blown by the worst example of fanfic ever.
let’s continue with the HP theme
not that it makes any real difference but I have been seeing “Galfoy”. Knowing that “foid” has increased in usage is a bummer tho
more in the comments
I already disliked the original [Harry Potter] for its lack of rationality as a child (how can they have magic and poverty at the same time?) so I loved the flip.
OK so does HPMOR solve poverty? (Q is rhetorical don’t answer)
If you didn’t like HP check out Grossman’s The Magicians. A lot of graduating magicians there join non-profits or hedge funds.
I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.
Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field I’m working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I won’t get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people don’t realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.
Anyway, I’m sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/
I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding.
Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.
I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?
personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto “whitepaper” phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and “work product” (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a “proof” thrown out as its defense
(it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)
Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!
If it’s actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If it’s a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which can’t be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof (because as you said in another comment, the real value is in understanding rather than theorems). The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.
I suppose what it comes down to is, if OpenAI couldn’t be bothered to try and elucidate their results, or even try to separate nonsensical exploits from genuine proofs, I don’t understand why mathematicians shouldn’t treat all of it as worthless instead of doing unpaid PR work for them.
Place like /r/singularity and hackernews are eating up the hype and buying into it. Even with mathematicians explaining carefully the errors in the proofs and why they are badly written and useless to actually progress in mathematics the boosters are treating that like sour grapes or irrational fear. If mathematicians tried outright ignoring it, OpenAI’s narrative would go even more unchallenged.
I think the problem, from a layman’s perspective, is that it wasn’t until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.
This was exactly the point - flood the zone with shit to show how “smart” the stuff underlying your IP is
I mean, I don’t know, my confusion comes from also seeing a lot of mathematicians react as if mathematics are over and that it sucks that the future is all about checking AI proofs. And I suppose it’s unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesn’t elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAI’s shitty conduct, I mean.)
I imagine that it’s the same thing that programmers have been dealing with. Basically everyone I’ve talked to has acknowledged that code reviews are important parts of the software development process, but nobody has ever said they like them. Now here comes the glorious LLM future where in order to maximize productivity you get to do nothing but code reviews forever, only worse because the answer to “what were they thinking when they wrote this” is always “lmao fuk u”. Even ignoring what kind of consequence that kind of change would have on the actual progress of the field of mathematics, it also just makes being a mathematician into a different kind of day-to-day job, and one that most people who are currently in the field would likely find far less satisfying. And unlike the programmers they’re not even paid some absurd amount of money for it [citation needed].
We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).
rational investors enabling marginal utility… thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee
so what i’m getting from this is the only kind of progress openai and friends are capable of is progressing from slop grenades to slop airstrikes, and so far it only works because they have good marketing, augmented by their own bot farms, and because money is all you need, and so far they haven’t ran out of money
First up: thanks for your hard work here in the sneer mines during these ridiculous times!
I saw this being ignored on HN and I thought that you might appreciate it:
Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation – Why Lean Verification of AI Autoformalisation Does not Guarantee Correct Natural Language Proofs
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144
The authors point out that automatic translation of natural language mathematics into Lean is very hard, actually. They also highlight some examples of such translation errors in the Navier-Stokes “paper” published by OpenAI. They tread lightly and don’t take a position on the correctness of the proof, but they do bring a large stack of receipts.
I also thought the reference to the Solvability Complexity Index (which is new to me) was interesting, and there’s an appendix with an explainer on how the SCI hierarchy is constructed. According to this scheme, autoformalisation of natural language proofs is strictly harder than the Halting Problem.
I haven’t had a chance to check on the bona fides of the authors.
This is all beyond my level, but I’d love to see what our local experts think of it in light of the recent gish galop.
There’s apparently an “Association for Human Mathematics” that has released the following statement:
Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.
Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.
Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.
Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.
Stuff like this highlights that the "info"dump was an act of contempt toward professional mathematics. If OAI actually gave a damn about people, they could have coordinated with actual researchers in the relevant fields to clean up the documents while putting a human face on them. Put everything behind NDAs, fund some grants and fellowships, and if it leaks? So what, it would have been actual good press and built hype. Plus, it would have weeded out the the obvious garbage and they’d have brought a lot of young researchers inside the tent.
But nooooooo, they chose violence, because they are assholes. They’ll never forgive the academics for doing the work and actually being good at math and physics.
I know I’m preaching to the choir, but damn I’m stirred up.
If they actually gave a damn about people they wouldn’t be working at OpenAI
Happy cake day!
Thanks! :)
It isnt going to just be math, programming, various sites filled with usefull information that are now being closed because they keep being hammered by bots (or ddos attacks if they manage to actively block the bots) etc. What a waste.
If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.
just a peeve
here’s a personal blogpost on LW entitled “Three types of AI risk: why (some) leftists are against (some) AI regulations” (by “sudo-nym” which I admit is a great nick)
First sentence
You may have seen factions of the left being opposed to current attempts to regulate the AI industry, despite the fact that they clearly also want to stop AI.
OK Mr Sudo-Nym, if that is your real name, imma gonna stop you right there
Which “factions”?
Are these factions actually in existence, or are they just Xhitter/Bluesky handles? If you’re provide like, I dunno, sources, we could maybe evaluate this ourselves. It would also clarify whether these are US leftists as opposed to leftists in other countries which are in my experience a bit more attuned to both political realities and have a more theoretical foundation.
As it is it feels as if you’re fighting windmills in your imagination.
Commenters point out that the “frontier labs” are actually raging capitalists so there’s that.
Most of rationalism seems to be “Making up a guy and getting mad at him” doesn’t it?
but but but don’t call it strawmanning!!!
My real opponent lives in Canada. And no, you can’t meet him.
The factions exist and those are the hardcore anarchists.
A real electoral powerhouse.
(Aka a few guys on bsky with 10k followers max total).
And I say that as somebody who feels anarchist aligned.
I’m starting to believe that Sam Altman’s reputation as a genius salesman is a bit overrated
Accept ‘bad things’ in return for benefits of AI, says Sam Altman
Apparently the media is also ignoring that right now the lawsuit against her m bu his sister is ongoing.
Ever since the beginning of the current AI bubble, there has always been a certain type of dipshit who takes some art posted on social media by an artist, feeds it to AI, and then comments with the slop image saying that they made it “better”. Well, now I am on the receiving end of that. In one of my papers, I (foolishly) wrote down a few comments on future directions, and now some motherfucker decides to send me an obviously ChatGPT generated manuscript with a solution to one of my problems.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it. But the manuscript is written in a way that obviously indicates that he hasn’t even read it. There’s even a section describing experiments for this mathematical question (???), complete with a “verification guide” that references an “archive” full of python scripts and test cases that he did not send me. I suspect he doesn’t even know they exist.
Unfortunately, I think their AI generated proof is itself correct, so I have to deal with it.
Well you can just ignore it, or even steal it. No copyright on it anyway ;).
Or cite it, but in the most passive aggressive way you can get away with.
…You should check the literature really carefully to make sure that whatever proof the AI “generated” doesn’t actually already exist somewhere and it regurgitated it without proper accreditation.
The spammer in question had previously posted a bigger result, but the writeup was so badly written that some people in the field wrote a new, readable paper with the same result. In their abstract, they specifically cited him and said that the proof was so unreadable that they were unable to follow the details, and they had no choice but to write their own proof. (The spammer’s proof also used math that was advanced enough to be far beyond his knowledge.)
My pet theory is that after this embarrassment, the spammer saw that nobody was able to verify his argument. Now the real problem is that his paper was written so badly that nobody could understand it (in math, you can’t verify what you can’t understand), but somehow he thought that the problem was that he didn’t add an experiments section!
