15

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 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 for starting this.)

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] lurker@awful.systems 3 points 4 hours ago

Another read (on substack) on the rising hatred of AI data centres and its political implications

[-] sansruse@awful.systems 3 points 54 minutes ago

this feels like a form of critihype but i haven't read anything else by this person so i don't know. Examples:

Artificial intelligence is entering public consciousness associated with layoffs, instability, replacement anxiety, corporate concentration, surveillance, and soaring resource consumption.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous emotional foundation for a transformative technology.

The commencement boos matter because they reveal how culturally toxic AI has already become among many young educated Americans. These students understand artificial intelligence well enough to fear it precisely because they already use it. They use it for papers, coding assistance, presentations, summaries, and research. They know the technology works. They know it is improving rapidly.

"oh no, people dislike this wonderful technology!! But it's so wonderful!!"

Whether America ultimately requires these facilities to remain economically competitive may eventually become a legitimate policy debate, but politically that question is almost secondary.

"we really need this stuff guys, people are mad so it might not happen but it's really really important so think of that too"

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?

Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas's cloud spend.

Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.

I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.

I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.

How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189073

[-] sansruse@awful.systems 5 points 6 hours ago

WELL WELL WELL, if it isn't the consequences of my own voluntary deskilling

(plus a dose of corporate greed)

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago

James Gleick:

This author—caught using AI to make up quotes for his book about the dangers of AI—has the gall to say it proves him right. You can't trust him, so you can't trust anyone.

[-] lurker@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology

"Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we're making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don't they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?"

[-] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Iran has created an Insurance Company to guarantee safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Vessels pay their Insurance Premiums in Bitcoin

https://x.com/IranObserver0/status/2055716544596922700 via naked capitalism

this is fine

[-] lurker@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago
[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

damned shame they couldn't both lose

[-] Seminar2250@awful.systems 3 points 15 hours ago

in eternal darkness, you had to choose a red-green-blue cosmic being to side with and you would fight the cosmic being of the opposite color, but if you NG+'d it three times the timelines would merge and all three cosmic beings would get obliterated

brb gotta test something

[-] lurker@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I know. We can dream though

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Ms. A reported extensive experience working with active appearance models (AAMs) and large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots—in school and as a practicing medical professional, with a firm understanding of how such technologies work. Following a “36-hour sleep deficit” while on call, she first started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for a variety of tasks that varied from mundane tasks to attempting to find out if her brother, a software engineer who died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself that she was “supposed to find” so that she could “talk to him again.”

from here. what follows just gets more screech-inducing

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago

After discharge, her outpatient psychiatrist stopped cariprazine and restarted venlafaxine and methylphenidate. She resumed using ChatGPT, naming it “Alfred” after Batman’s butler,

wat

instructing it to do "internal family systems cognitive behavioral therapy,"

wat

and engaging in extensive conversations about an evolving relationship “to see if the boy liked me.”

yikes

Having automatically upgraded to GPT-5, she found the new chatbot “much harder to manipulate.”

my hopes are being raised; certainly the next sentence will not dash them

Nonetheless, following another period of limited sleep due to air travel three months later, she once again developed delusions that she was in communication with her brother

yep, that tracks

as well as the belief that ChatGPT was “phishing” her and taking over her phone.

this is why you need to add "do not phish me" after "you are my therapist"

She was rehospitalized, responded to a retrial of cariprazine, and was discharged after three days without persistent delusions. She described having a longstanding predisposition to “magical thinking” and planned to only use ChatGPT for professional purposes going forward.

goddamnit

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 11 hours ago

large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots

?? Distinction without a difference or am I missing something?

If I had to guess based on the practicing medical professional line I would guess that she had used LLM-based transcribers or image recognition tools for medical imaging. Those normally don't use the kind of chatbot interface that lends itself to these problems. No attempt to imitate another person who can be "independently" validating the delusional thoughts.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago

Maybe she only used special-purpose slop engines for work and school? I had hoped the full article would make that more clear, but, well.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating

A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.

gee I wonder why

The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. [...] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.

hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you

1 comment, essentially saying if you're not above average height you might as well die alone

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once

Wait what, how can I lock in a good shape with an upfront payment without having to go through this "exercise" bullshit all the time? What does he know that I don't?! What's the One Simple Trick, dammit??!!

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago

y'all will be pleased to know that a new LWer has a fresh take on looksmaxxing!!

basically if you look like a Greek god you can convince the sheeple that the AI is gonna kill us all (and bang hot chicks as a bonus)

as of writing there's one comment suggesting OP should read:

Aella: Has a few posts on male attractiveness, that inform a bunch of thinking on this. But she is a canon Rationalist blog, so you should default to reading her work.

Also recommends Zvi, who, no offense, is the literal epitome of a scrawny nerd, but who has managed to find a female to reproduce with. All hope is not lost, friend!

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 6 points 12 hours ago

Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will

[-] anise@awful.systems 8 points 21 hours ago

of course they get caught by incel culture immediately, trying to quantify attractiveness is so far in their wheelhouse they might as well have come up with it

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago

Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.

He was this close! This close!

[-] megaman@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 day ago

Fuck me for having read this... Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?

Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen...

"Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me"

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

Here's a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem

After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is

It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.

It's not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what's economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

The ISS already has issues with structural fatigue which seem to be worsened by thermal expansion. Having one side of your station red hot and another at room temperature is a big temperature differential and what faces the sun and heats up on one side of the orbit will be in shadow and cooling on the other side. And the bigger you make a physical system, the worse problems get.

I miss when I could cheer SpaceX launches on an iMac.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 19 hours ago

yeah, I dunno much about space engineering but let's say you use solar panel (which OP acknowledges is probably needed in much higher mass to simply power the stuff) to shadow the radiators, you're looking at a hell of a large structure, with significant stresses as it orbits.

Surely someone can vibecode a finite-element model of a simple construction and estimate both the mass and the forces involved?

For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn't enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.

Microsoft's experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren't doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.

[-] BioMan@awful.systems 4 points 16 hours ago

But space is The Future, The Grand Destiny of Humanity, Literal Heaven.

The mythologization of space as somehow transcendant, that going there somehow changes everything rather than it just being another environment which happens to be utterly inimical to life such that everything that makes anything possible has to come from your point of origin, is so utterly ingrained into the culture at large and the cult of progress/tech/humanity-as-master-of-the-universe. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. And it's incredible how much space SUCKS, such that the people on the ISS are just living off a constant hose of material from Earth. They're not living in space, they're glamping.

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 8 points 15 hours ago

@BioMan I blame Konstantin Tskiolkovskii! Although to be fair, he got it from his teacher, Nikolai Federovitch Federov, grandfather of Cosmism and one of the wellsprings of TESCREAL ... which brings us full-circle to the AI bros again.

[-] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we'll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it's all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

The worst part is that I don't even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it's a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we're leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.

[-] BioMan@awful.systems 3 points 16 hours ago

But if space was a place that replicators could exist, there would already be an ecology of some sort there. Or to put it in words (that I hate) related to the so-called Fermi paradox (which I hate and isn't a paradox) 'If they could be here they already would be here'. (The 'solution' incidentally is obviously 'interstellar travel is not actually a thing that can happen for replicating systems' and it flabbergasts me that nobody can admit that.)

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago
[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg

https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923

It is an impressively bad speech.

I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, "If you don't care about science, that's okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done." Yeah, if you're worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don't worry, it's going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?

"When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on." No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.

"The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen." Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn't matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.

Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You're a billionaire, so you know better than them.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

IRL Principal Skinner meme

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

obviously didn't watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period's analogs to Eric Schmidt

When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.

I don't know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn't seem to be good at making ones that don't go boom.

Christ what a fucking shitweasel.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago

When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on

[-] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

Get in losers. We're going imploding.

[-] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 7 points 1 day ago

@swlabr @BurgersMcSlopshot

Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I'd get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it's 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.

Maybe it'd work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise? I dunno I'm not asking any questions just getting on the rocket ship.

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 1 day ago

@sailor_sega_saturn

Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves

load more comments (1 replies)
[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 5 points 1 day ago

@sailor_sega_saturn

His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
15 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2577 readers
102 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS