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. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
Noted Apple blowhard John Gruber makes a mistake, is naturally a performative dick about apologizing for it
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
(nothing to do with AI or crypto, I just think Gruber is a dick. And the subject of the story - an app developer who apparently felt so secure in his indie rep he could do some light fraud for clicks - is a recognizable figure)
Grokipedia hasn’t been updated for months: is it because
- it has been vibe coded into unmaintainability
- the people responsible for it no longer care
- the people responsible for it are utterly incompetent
- all of the above?
I’m assuming that it isn’t “the llm bills were too high” just yet, but maybe it could be that, too.
https://futurism.com/future-society/grokipedia-broken-nobody-noticed
I think you’re discounting the most likely explanation: that it discovered and communicated the purest transcendent truth and therefore there is no need for further updates.
Or maybe nobody was actually checking it for anything and the bot running it has been patiently waiting for more prompts that haven’t come because nobody gave a shit.
In 2016, Scott Alexander reviewed the autobiography of pharmaceutical pioneers Alexander aand Ann Shulgin:
Shulgin and his friends seem like good people. But not, crucially, like the best people. Shulgin himself – by his own admission, based on facts that he himself presents in his own autobiography – is consistently kind of a jerk to his wife (and his wife kind of agrees). He gets depressed and ornery a lot, sometimes to the point where it seriously interferes with his work and relationships. His circle of friends seems to have some problems with marital infidelity and random drama, and he tells one story about a distant friend-of-a-friend obsessed with LSD who seems to be an outright con man. I’m not saying they’re bad people; quite the opposite, the book makes them seem very human and if I lived in the same time and place as them I would be delighted to have the opportunity to know them.
…
The Shulgins met through a group that had branched off of Mensa. Their social circle consisted of a mishmash of scientists, underachieving geniuses, mental health professionals, hippies, and people convinced that their new projects were going to save the world – all in the context of Berkeley and the Bay Area. This is also my social circle, thirty years later, so it’s interesting to see how things have changed and how they’ve stayed the same.
Its a very common tic in American culture to state that white dudes who did something wrong or hurt people were good at heart, and to skip “how can we prevent this from happening again with rules and policies?” or “how can we make good with the victims?”
man I remember when serving ads to bots was considered fraud and the advertisers would complain and claw back the payments. sign of the times.
Paying the ai companies to incorporate your ads seems cheaper and easier, but that would seem to manipulative i guess
My god, they’re making furbys:
I’m morbidly curious about how they’re going to animate a doughnut. Is it going to wobble? Quiver? Oh god people are gonna, aren’t they…
the orifice will pulse invitingly
That sounds like a great way to harm some cylinders.
Slay the spire already did it. There is a donut shaped boss.
And again openAI is late to the party. The realdoll company is already making educational ai robots. ;)
gonna be the biggest flop since that facehugger apple made
Tamagotchi didn’t die for this
Speaking a gibberish language is an application genAI is actually capable of delivering on!
Oh excellent, we’ve reinvented Furbies except more creepy
I don’t know. My wife swears up and down that the furby she had as a kid was afraid of the dark and would call out for help if it was held upside-down. We can’t find any recollection of this behavior or documentation elsewhere, so it may have also been actually haunted.
Being a child and therefore a monster, her response was to leave it in the dark closet hanging upside-down until it accepted that this was its life now.
another good linkedin post from gebru: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-given-that-ive-lived-to-share-7491265404808396800-E6js/
Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI’s ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
“They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”
The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.
The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap.
In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”
Even supposing the technology worked as advertised—and that’s very much a supposition arguendo, one that flies in the face of the facts—it’s hard for me to think of any mathematical discovery that would be worth the cost of the AI industry. How many people in Memphis would I give respiratory cancer in order to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Zero, you absolute fuckers.
The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.
Amazing how often that happens
I distinctly remember being told that AI would help mathematics by providing a better way to search the literature.
Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.
He made a song instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d
Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:
Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”
💀
May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.
thiel’s lawyers are gonna merc him
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr
sentences that feel like being shot 50 times
I found the song - was a fun listen all around.
I’m leaving OpenAI to start Jurassic Park A+ No notes
Mass is estimated; only Chinese weights are public.
OK that one got me
I feel like the pitch is less Jurassic Park and more Dinotopia by the end, but tbh I’m fully on board either way.
I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?
Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.
Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.
I mean if he had been willing to grift on it without actually creating anything he probably could have made some decent money in the current environment, but also I’m of the opinion that those folks willing to do that oughta be sent to install that orbital infrastructure by hand without a spacesuit, so probably for the best.
sitting in a work presentation around linkedin link on agentic use levels. It’s fucking dumb. Nobody reviews shit and it seems like the whole org is getting dumber.
The flag “-dangerously-skip-permissions” sounds like something that would have come out of a joke a few years ago. I wonder what the incredibly predictable consequences of encouraging everyone to do something that has “dangerous” in the goddamn name are going to be.
just heard the term “valuemaxxing”. Kill me.
oh oh i think i learned this in calculus class
If the math teachers start making rap songs about this jargon, and if enough youth pastors emulate it while sitting backward in enough chairs, we might yet kill it dead.
In positive news, Darius has found a way to build an ethical chatbot https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/
So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.
Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/
The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph
Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.
Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.
/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?
Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.
Not sure who Wes Streeting is
I’d say he is a shitty transphobic blairite labour politician and current cabinet member, but I don’t know how much that narrows things down. He holds a non-trivial amount of political power in the uk. There was a brief moment where it looked like he’d replace keir starmer.
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