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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025

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...)

145 comments
  • I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like

    The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes

    and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?

  • Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

    https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

    Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

    • Recently, I found myself dealing with a hallucinating Grok (as the xAI chatbot is known). I was working on an article [...] I offered Grok a very specific query: [...] What followed was like an argument with an especially lucid drunk.

      Imagine this, but everything and forever.

      Edit:

      The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.

      I think calling the current model one where "the listeners became suppliers" is a misunderstanding of how we got here. If the point was to connect people in a two-way link then the context needs to shift away from a third party's efforts to profit from it. Like, we don't see all the crazies and grifters because we seek them out or what they're trying to do, but because it's profitable for the platforms and providers to connect us to them instead of the people we're actually trying to reach, whether that be to hang out with friends/family, learn from a teacher/writer/journalist, or participate in an open society. Our ability to make those connections has been hijacked in order to boost the level of insanity because it's more profitable to take advantage of both sides desire for connection without actually letting either one get what they want or need.

  • 404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered

    It's a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don't have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

    I really didn't think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, "an insult to life itself".

  • LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can't spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like "well you're prompting it wrong" (paraphrased) as well as "why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they're doing os their work can be automated"

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/r3NeiHAEWyToers4F/frontier-ai-models-still-fail-at-basic-physical-tasks-a#comments

    The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current "AI" (LLMs) to work in the real world.

    • “why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”

      none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it's called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot

      e: ok at least op is a machinist

      Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn't correlate with real world usefulness.

      benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!

      My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.

      with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these

      • The fact this commenter doesn't mention the absolute fuckton of machining videos on Youtube tells me they're just talking out of their ass.

        (not that forcing those into LLM slop would help but a hypothetical AGI would learn a lot)

        Also

        Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, recently worried about a world where only 30% of jobs become automated, leading to class tensions between the automated and non-automated. Instead, he predicts that nearly all jobs will be automated simultaneously, putting everyone "in the same boat."

        Dario is delusional. We don't even have self driving cars outside of a very small, very expensive demo in SF

145 comments