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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 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.)

102 comments
  • Bringing over aio's comment from the end of last week's stubsack:

    This week the WikiMedia Foundation tried to gather support for adding LLM summaries to the top of every Wikipedia article. The proposal was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

    Way down in the linked wall o' text, there's a comment by "Chaotic Enby" that struck me:

    Another summary I just checked, which caused me a lot more worries than simple inaccuracies: Cambrian. The last sentence of that summary is "The Cambrian ended with creatures like myriapods and arachnids starting to live on land, along with early plants.", which already sounds weird: we don't have any fossils of land arthropods in the Cambrian, and, while there has been a hypothesis that myriapods might have emerged in the Late Cambrian, I haven't heard anything similar being proposed about arachnids. But that's not the worrying part.

    No, the issue is that nowhere in the entire Cambrian article are myriapods or arachnids mentioned at all. Only one sentence in the entire article relates to that hypothesis: "Molecular clock estimates have also led some authors to suggest that arthropods colonised land during the Cambrian, but again the earliest physical evidence of this is during the following Ordovician". This might indicate that the model is relying on its own internal knowledge, and not just on the contents of the article itself, to generate an "AI overview" of the topic instead.

    Further down the thread, there's a comment by "Gnomingstuff" that looks worth saving:

    There was an 8-person community feedback study done before this (a UI/UX text using the original Dopamine summary), and the results are depressing as hell. The reason this was being pushed to prod sure seems to be the cheerleading coming from 7 out of those 8 people: "Humans can lie but AI is unbiased," "I trust AI 100%," etc.

    Perhaps the most depressing is this quote -- "This also suggests that people who are technically and linguistically hyper-literate like most of our editors, internet pundits, and WMF staff will like the feature the least. The feature isn't really "for" them" -- since it seems very much like an invitation to ignore all of us, and to dismiss any negative media coverage that may ensue (the demeaning "internet pundits").

    Sorry for all the bricks of text here, this is just so astonishingly awful on all levels and everything that I find seems to be worse than the last.

    Another comment by "CMD" evaluates the summary of the dopamine article mentioned there:

    The first sentence is in the article. However, the second sentence mentions "emotion", a word that while in a couple of reference titles isn't in the article at all. The third sentence says "creating a sense of pleasure", but the article says "In popular culture and media, dopamine is often portrayed as the main chemical of pleasure, but the current opinion in pharmacology is that dopamine instead confers motivational salience", a contradiction. "This neurotransmitter also helps us focus and stay motivated by influencing our behavior and thoughts". Where is this even from? Focus isn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is influencing thoughts. As for the final sentence, depression is mentioned a single time in the article in what is almost an extended aside, and any summary would surely have picked some of the examples of disorders prominent enough to be actually in the lead.

    So that's one of five sentences supported by the article. Perhaps the AI is hallucinating, or perhaps it's drawing from other sources like any widespread llm. What it definitely doesn't seem to be doing is taking existing article text and simplifying it.

  • So, I've been spending too much time on subreddits with heavy promptfondler presence, such as /r/singularity, and the reddit algorithm keeps recommending me subreddit with even more unhinged LLM hype. One annoying trend I've noted is that people constantly conflate LLM-hybrid approaches, such as AlphaGeometry or AlphaEvolve (or even approaches that don't involve LLMs at all, such as AlphaFold) with LLMs themselves. From their they act like of course LLMs can [insert things LLMs can't do: invent drugs, optimize networks, reliably solve geometry exercise, etc.].

    Like I saw multiple instances of commenters questioning/mocking/criticizing the recent Apple paper using AlphaGeometry as a counter example. AlphaGeometry can actually solve most of the problems without an LLM at all, the LLM component replaces a set of heuristics that make suggestions on proof approaches, the majority of the proof work is done by a symbolic AI working with a rigid formal proof system.

    I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this, just something I noted that I don't want to waste the energy repeatedly re-explaining on reddit, so I'm letting a primal scream out here to get it out of my system.

    • Relatedly, the gathering of (useful, actually works in real life, can be used to make products that turn a profit or that people actually want, and sometimes even all of the above at the same time) computer vision and machine learning and LLMs under the umbrella of “AI” is something I find particularly galling.

      The eventual collapse of the AI bubble and the subsequent second AI winter is going to take a lot of useful technology with it that had the misfortune to be standing a bit too close to LLMs.

    • Yes, thank you, I'm also annoyed about this. Even classic "AI" approaches for simple pattern detection (what used to be called "ML" a few hype waves ago, although it's much older than that even) are now conflated with capabilities of LLMs. People are led to believe that ChatGPT is the latest and best and greatest evolution of "AI" in general, with all capabilities that have ever been in anything. And it's difficult to explain how wrong this is without getting too technical.

      Related, this fun article: ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977

  • Did you know there’s a new fork of xorg, called x11libre? I didn’t! I guess not everyone is happy with wayland, so this seems like a reasonable

    It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.. [snip]

    Together we'll make X great again!

    Oh dear. Project members are of course being entirely normal about the whole thing.

    Metux, one of the founding contributors, is Enrico Weigelt, who has reasonable opinions like everyone except the nazis were the real nazis in WW2, and also had an anti vax (and possibly eugenicist) rant on the linux kernel mailing list, as you do.

    In sure it’ll be fine though. He’s a great coder.

    (links were unashamedly pillaged from this mastodon thread: https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/114664107545048173)

    • Ok, maybe someone can help me here figure something out.

      I've wondered for a long time about a strange adjacency which I sometimes observe between what I call (due to lack of a better term) "unix conservativism" and fascism. It's the strange phenomenon where ideas about "classic" and "pure" unix systems coincide with the worst politics. For example the "suckless" stuff. Or the ramblings of people like ESR. Criticism of systemd is sometimes infused with it (yes, there is plenty of valid criticism as well. But there's this other kind of criticism I've often seen, which is icky and weirdly personal). And I've also seen traces of this in discussions of programming languages newer than C, especially when topics like memory safety come up.

      This is distinguished from retro computing and nostalgia and such, those are unrelated. If someone e.g. just likes old unix stuff, that's not what I mean.

      You may already notice, I struggle a bit to come up with a clear definition and whether there really is a connection or just a loose set of examples that are not part of a definable set. So, is there really something there or am I seeing a connection that doesn't exist?

      I've also so far not figured out what might create the connection. Ideas I have come up with are: appeal to times that are gone (going back to an idealized computing past that never existed), elitism (computers must not become user friendly), ideas of purity (an imaginary pure "unix philosophy").

      Anyway, now with this new xlibre project, there's another one that fits into it...

      • I think the common ground is a fear of loss of authority to which they feel entitled. They learned the "old" ways of SysV RC, X11, etc. etc. and that is their domain of expertise, in which they fear being surpassed or obsoleted. From there, it's easy to combine that fear with the fears stoked by adjacent white/male supremacist identity politics and queerphobia, plus the resentment already present from stupid baby slapfights like vi vs emacs or systemd vs everything else, and generate a new asshole identity in which they feel temporarily secure. Fear of loss of status drives all of this.

      • Nostalgia has a lowkey reactionary impulse part(see also why those right wing reactionary gamer streamers who do ten hour reactive criticize a movie streams have their backgrounds filled with consumer nerd media toys (and almost never books)) and fear of change is also a part of conservatism. 'Engineering minds' who think they can solve things, and have a bit more rigid thinking also tend to be attracted to more extremist ideologies (which usually seems to have more rigid rules and lesser exceptions), which also leads back to the problem where people like this are bad at not realizing their minds are not typical (I can easily use a console so everyone else can and should). So it makes sense to me. Not sure if the ui thing is elitism or just a strong desire to create and patrol the borders of an ingroup. (But isnt that just what elitism is?)

      • I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because it's often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people -- and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.

        I also feel they're very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and it's my favorite editor because it's what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I can't be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists aren't some of the most obnoxious people online.

      • Don't have much to add, other than I first became aware of this connection when Freenode imploded. I wrote in a short essay that

        [the] dominant ideology of new Freenode is free speech, anti-LGBT, and adherence to fringe Unix shibboleths such as anti-systemd, anti-Codes of Conduct, and anti anti-RMS.

        (src)

        Maybe it's connected to the phenomenon of old counter-cultural activist become massive racists.

    • The whole Linux userbase loves x11libre, an initiative to preserve X11 alive as an alternative to Wayland! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you x11libre guy is a Nazi apologist

    • @rook
      It seems to be so libre that it's liberating itself of people wanting to use/contribute to it!
      @BlueMonday1984

    • (this probably deserves its own post because it seems destined to be a shitshow full of the worst people, but I know nothing about the project or the people currently involved)

  • "Cursor YOLO deleted everything in my computer":

    Hi everyone - as a previous context I’m an AI Program Manager at J&J and have been using Cursor for personal projects since March.

    Yesterday I was migrating some of my back-end configuration from Express.js to Next.js and Cursor bugged hard after the migration - it tried to delete some old files, didn’t work at the first time and it decided to end up deleting everything on my computer, including itself. I had to use EaseUS to try to recover the data, but didn’t work very well also. Lucky I always have everything on my Google Drive and Github, but it still scared the hell out of me.

    Now I’m allergic to YOLO mode and won’t try it anytime soon again. Does anyone had any issue similar than this or am I the first one to have everything deleted by AI?

    The response:

    Hi, this happens quite rarely but some users do report it occasionally.

    My T-shirt is raising questions already answered, etc.

    (via)

    • This is a good example of something that I feel like I need to drill at a bit more. I'm pretty sure that this isn't an unexpected behavior or an overfitting of the training data. Rather, given the niche question of "what time zone does this tiny community use?" one relatively successful article in a satirical paper should have an outsized impact on the statistical patterns surrounding those words, and since as far as the model is concerned there is no referent to check against this kind of thing should be expected to keep coming up when specific topics or phrases come up near each other in relatively novel ways. The smaller number of examples gives each one a larger impact on the overall pattern, so it should be entirely unsurprising that one satirical example "poisons" the output this cleanly.

      Assuming this is the case, I wonder if it's possible to weaponize it by identifying tokens with low overall reference counts that could be expanded with minimal investment of time. Sort of like Google bombing.

      • Assuming this is the case, I wonder if it’s possible to weaponize it by identifying tokens with low overall reference counts that could be expanded with minimal investment of time. Sort of like Google bombing.

        bet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda_network their approach seems to be less directional, initially was supposed to be doing something else (targeting human brains directly) and might have turned out to be a happy accident of sorts for them, but also they ramped up activities around end of 2022

      • Oh yeah, they'll say absolutely crazy shit about anything that is underrepresented in the training corpus, endlessly remixing what little was previously included therein. This is one reason LLMs are such a plague for cutting-edge science, particularly if any related crackpot nonsense has been snorted up by their owner's web scrapers.

        Poisoning would be a piece of cake.

  • And back on the subject of builder.ai, there’s a suggestion that it might not have been A Guy Instead, and the whole 700 human engineers thing was a misunderstanding.

    https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

    I’m not wholly sure I buy the argument, which is roughly

    • people from the company are worried that this sort of new will affect their future careers.
    • humans in the loop would have exhibited far too high latency, and getting an llm to do it would have been much faster and easier than having humans try to fake it at speed and scale.
    • there were over a thousand “external contractors” who were writing loads of code, but that’s not the same as being Guys Instead.

    I guess the question then is: if they did have a good genai tool for software dev… where is it? Why wasn’t Microsoft interested in it?

102 comments