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Want to wade into the sandy 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.)

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[-] BigMuffN69@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

(cross posting here and sneer club)

I regret to inform you, another Anthropic cofounder has written an essay about Claude fondling.

"Anthropic cofounder admits he is now "deeply afraid" ... "We are dealing with a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine ... We need the courage to see things as they are."

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1o6cow1/anthropic_cofounder_admits_he_is_now_deeply/?share_id=_x2zTYA61cuA4LnqZclvh

There's so many juicy chunks here.

"I came to this position uneasily. Both by virtue of my background as a journalist and my personality, I’m wired for skepticism...

...You see, I am also deeply afraid. It would be extraordinarily arrogant to think working with a technology like this would be easy or simple....

...And let me remind us all that the system which is now beginning to design its successor is also increasingly self-aware and therefore will surely eventually be prone to thinking, independently of us, about how it might want to be designed. Of course, it does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility it will want to do this in the future? No."

Despite my jests, I gotta say, posts reeks of desperation. Benchmaxxxing just isn't hitting like it used, bubble fears at all time high, and OAI and Google are the ones grabbing headlines with content generation and academic competition wins. The good folks at Anthropic really gotta be huffing your own farts to be believing they're in the race to wi-

"Years passed. The scaling laws delivered on their promise and here we are. And through these years there have been so many times when I’ve called Dario up early in the morning or late at night and said, 'I am worried that you continue to be right'. Yes, he will say. There’s very little time now."

LateNightZoomCallsAtAnthropic dot pee en gee

Bonus sneer: speaking of self aware wolves, Jagoff Clark somehow managed to updoot Doom's post?? Thinking the frog was unironically endorsing his view that the server farm was going to go rogue???? Will Jack achieve self awareness in the future? Of course, he does not do this today. But can I rule out the possibility he will do this in the future? Yes.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

What do you reckon the overlap is between the grown men who are mad about the new pokemon game and our regular subjects?

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago

The LW types not that much, at least not more than your average online rightwinger I think.

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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

A hackernews sells an AI powered toy to let kids "talk to Santa." $100 for 60 min, then $1 every additional minute.

Available at walmart dot com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45558375

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 4 days ago

I would like to congratulate the SV-brained OP for prompting sneers from his fellow orange site members, whether that be a fellow hackernews calling it "everything wrong with the current flavor of Ai in a single post/product", or someone openly tearing this shit apart:

You turned talking to Santa into a subscription service.

You are part of the problem. You are part of the thing everyone hates about technology in 2025.

This is a bad product.

[-] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

"remember 1-900 numbers? They're back! In AI form!"

Also I browsed other items on the site the phone came from and holy shit I have never seen a more cursed collection of products draped in Christmas shit.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

I also love that Walmart's desperate rush to catch up in e-commerce has resulted in their website becoming just as much of a slop farm as Amazon. My friend who works there said this just piles even more on an already overstressed staff, as people come into the store not understanding that the website lists a whole lot of stuff that isn't and never will be sold in the store. I doubt many people will come in asking for this piece of junk, tho.

[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

hi peeps! the first episode of the podcast i posted about last week is up now. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts. i don't know how long until i get to one of our favorites but its inevitable

https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947

rss:

https://feeds.zencastr.com/f/-mzEK14C.rss

[-] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Count me as excited to see where this goes. Absolutely fascinating to see this guy dredged from the abyss of history and see how cleanly it rhymes with modern horrible. And to see that the inability of bigots to write a goddamn joke isn't a recent loss.

Also the intro and outro compilations were beautiful. Very well done.

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[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 25 points 6 days ago
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[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

So they made an AI restaurant! It has a manifesto!

It’s… a printer for QR codes. That a guy who is reallly not equipped for sticking QR codes to bowls has to peel and stick onto bowls. And then they get filled by hilariously imprecise cereal dispensers.

They’re building an empire, yall.

(Via Jonty)

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Founders' credentials include a PhD, experience developing software, and being ranked #4 in League of Legends (European edition)

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Taxis dating and food. Love how the 'innovation' of AI is now just going after the uberfication targets of last time.

And the manifesto but just makes me think that this will be the first AI to attempt a mass shooting. Unhinged ahistorical manifesto usually precludes that. 'Roman siegeworks' what? (This isnt about siegeworks, it is about roman discipline, they should have thought about a defensive wall from the start. (It even has a technical name which I have forgotten). Literally the wrong conclusion imho. And if you look at the wiki page, the whole story about them building the defenses in the night is just made up (also the word is 'Contravallation' (which was also in the manifesto image, I need new glasses)).

Also think the step from 'victorious empire' to 'empire laying in ruins' the next paragraph is just bad writing.

And a last thing, the whole fadeing in of the text/images on the site is annoying, and also breaks for me at times. Causing the images to fade in and out randomly. "Made by sleep-deprived engineers and sheer will" that tracks.

"Behind a one-way mirror," They are watching you eat.

Most restaurant origin stories involve someone sharing their favorite taco recipe or whatever. These guys start off with a bad pop-history explanation of the battle of Alesia. That's how you know their food is great.

There's more where the founder of the company talks about how he really hated working at his family's restaurant while growing up (good sign). Knowing that his family came from China adds another layer of weirdness, in my opinion. The characters where the company name comes from (改革) can be read in both Chinese (gǎigé) and Japanese (kaikaku) and mean the same thing (reform) in both languages. It just feels so weird that he talks so much fluff about Julius Caesar, mentions his family from China and then, out of the blue, uses a Japanese name for the company. What is with these people fetishizing ancient Rome and Japan so much?

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago

Yeah, one is tempted to search for a historical throughline here, an axis if you will

Alesia was the turning point. With the fall of Gaul, Julius Caesar became the most powerful man in the Roman world.

We conveniently forgot about all the civil wars that happened afterwards that resulted in the dismantling of the Roman republic and Caesar taking absolute power. Oh yeah, I see it now.

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

There's also a village in ~~aquitaine~~ Armorica that he never properly conquered...

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

Translator's note: kaikaku means flan

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

And how does a 23-year-old whose parents run a Chinese restaurant have >$600,000 to found a company? Austria is a conservative country with a lot of old money and laws that are not friendly to small speculative businesses.

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

It can be done (friends and I have tried around 2007, and saw minor success until the company ran headfirst into the financial crisis and our inflexibility regarding user privacy and choice), but it’s not easy if you don’t already have money and connections.

If you do have those connections, nobody will stop you from building the stupid company of your dreams tbh.

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[-] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Its just so tiring. Now a rather prominent KDE dev is also valiantly defending the fashtech flagship projects from being accurately described as fascist.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

I scrolled down two toots and found this

dunno this person at all but that’s a pretty telling start

[-] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 5 days ago

Its a shame really because his video on Lunduke wasn't too bad but as it turns out he is the worlds most laughable centrist.

[-] self@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

hyprland is not fascist. Ladybird being fascist is IMO very debatable. But on the whole, the idea of having your OS itself tell you not to use software for political reason is not going to work in our favor and, if done in an hyperbolic way like this, it will make the left look really dumb

this charlie kirk saga is teaching me that the left-wing community is roughly just as bad as the right-wing one when it comes to fact-checking and not providing convenient but uncertain possibilities as correct

it’s really weird how this asshole needs us to believe fascists aren’t fascist and keeps going out of his way to talk about how dumb the left is, isn’t it.

for anyone wondering what the rest of the toxicity in the Wayland ecosystem that isn’t hyprland looks like, it’s dickheads like this controlling every conversation and technical decision. if you dig into the accounts this dickhead interacts with, you’ll see plenty of KDE and GNOME profiles clapping along to this shit. Wayland isn’t the way it is by accident.

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[-] corbin@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Obituaries are being run for John Searle. Most obituaries will focus on the Chinese Room thought experiment, an important bikeshed in AI research noted for the ease with which freshmen can incorrectly interpret it. I'm glad to see that Wikipedia puts above the Chinese Room the fact that he was a landlord who sued the city of Berkeley and caused massive rent increases in the 1990s; I'm also happy that Wikipedia documents his political activity and sexual-assault allegations.

[-] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 14 points 5 days ago

Every time an academic who featured in my education is posted about here I learn some new Horrible.

[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago

AI slop has been discovered in an anatomy textbook (the news originally broke on TikTok, but I discovered this through Bluesky):

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

To provide some good news for this week, the Fediverse is reporting a spike in users (thanks to David Gerard for finding this):

Whilst accurate fedi stats are pretty difficult to get, I'm inclined to believe the influx is genuine - after the CEO Meltdown on Bluesky, its clear people are jumping ship.

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this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2025
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