Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 day ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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 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.)

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[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago

Send more tech billionaires to space, more often, for longer: https://web.archive.org/web/20220117205028/https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/01/we-dont-know-why-but-being-in-space-causes-us-to-destroy-our-blood/

[-] aninjury2all@awful.systems 1 points 4 hours ago

I’m at a bar trying to watch the Knicks, and there’s someone 2 seats over from me very loudly talking to their date about AI with a lot of LessWrong-coded talking points. For the love of Jalen Bronson just let me watch the fucking game

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago

Masnick also has a story on how Musk got away with hiding just how many Twitter shares he owned when he bought the company https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/11/elon-musk-settles-sec-lawsuit-for-spare-change-proving-once-again-that-rules-are-for-other-people/

[-] samvines@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago

I've not seen this shared here yet so I thought I'd share: Is AI Profitable Yet? https://isaiprofitable.com/

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

Mike Masnick had a look at Twitter's financials in the SpaceX IPO. From $4.5 billion in ad revenue in 2021, twitter + Grok is down to $3 billion ad revenue a year (and losing $6 billion a year just on the CSAM-generating chatbot). His billionaire friends tossed in $2 billion or $250 million each into the kitty after a brief chat back in 2022.

[-] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 11 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

In the latest episode of "behold the power of Mythos" from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software

I distilled it so you don't have to.

Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.

That 10,000 count didn't even survive until paragraph 3.

Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.

Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!

23,019 potential vulnerability candidates

Ok now we're talking.

1,900 Reviewed by external security firms

Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?

1726 confirmed positive

You couldn't even cherry pick the valid ones?

467 reported to maintainers

Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better...

1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)

1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers

Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic's media release has the goods!

1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves

Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.

Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity

1587 is lower than the infographic's 1726 confirmed positives.... But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?

On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.

I'm sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos' own estimations. But wasn't that 1129 the bulk of your reports?

We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.

530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers...

65 of those have been given public advisories

The infographic says 88.

I'd ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.

23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you'd probably hit the same level of accuracy.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 8 points 15 hours ago

All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you'd probably get better value for your buck.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago

I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)

Got a list of a couple of names I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago

Vibenarok

[-] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 3 points 8 hours ago

Eschatoken

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 12 hours ago

ooh, brava!

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 3 points 13 hours ago

Perfection

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 6 points 14 hours ago

Anthropic (who own Claude Code) are hoping to IPO this year.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 14 hours ago

it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), but-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time

[0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…

[-] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 4 points 6 hours ago

I honestly can't think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:

something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
something where copy paste is a viable strategy
sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.

Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they're not even coming close. Not even with access to "partner" black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.

And they know they're not succeeding, because they wouldn't bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.

Luckily for them, the slop "news" blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.

[-] zogwarg@awful.systems 13 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

EDIT, snippets:

We cannot be satisfied with [...] the so-called “alignment” of AI [..] without [..] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. [...]

[ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. [...]

[-] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 hours ago

we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it...

Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good... The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all...

A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.

The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.

Doesn't claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they're immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.

From the pope's first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"

Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can't even get past the first full chapter of this shit.

[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 6 points 9 hours ago

Seizing "the res novæ of our time" [derogatory] from this

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

I don't think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media...)

Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn't be given healthcare). It's hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:

Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 9 hours ago

just gonna leave https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/g-s1-97651/gender-affirming-care-ban-catholic-hospitals here

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 8 hours ago

Timnit Gebru:

... an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope's speech where he said that they will "work together to "find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence." Chris Olah wasn't a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.

[-] lurker@awful.systems 3 points 8 hours ago

what the fuck’s the Pope gonna do, convert Claude to Christianity?

[-] Evinceo@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago

Not if Dawkins converts Claudia to Atheism first!

[-] lurker@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

I can’t decide if I hate hardcore atheist or hardcore christian claude more

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 16 points 15 hours ago

When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 7 points 13 hours ago

for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 8 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

tired: butletian jihad

wired: butlerian crusade

e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom

[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago

back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you're an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, "oh but they're useful for some things, like making summaries".

four years and billions of dollars and devastation to "improve" them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that "AI summaries" are going well:

[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 12 points 18 hours ago

it's hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don't already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it's signal-shaped noise). but I'll try.

Long (click to expand)

Plot errors

Or, "does this thing even work?" (the answer is no).

A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we're waiting for it to this day, it's not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.
The Queen's sons and Robert's brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that's debatable as he's a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert's brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned's son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It's famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King's Brothers And His Sons.
Robert's young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.
The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔
The guardians of the realm's Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn't the people beyond the Wall but what they're running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.

Synopsis errors

These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.

"Good and evil content for power": ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.
"Menacing barbarians gather their forces": As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren't actually barbarians, or if they are they're still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: "Meanwhile, Ned Stark's bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…"
"Set in a glittering fantasy world": This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there's plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn't distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. "A glittering fantasy world" is like calling Dubai a "glittering urban city" or North Korea a "glittering green farmscape" and leaving it at that.
"Deftly realised magic": The series does the "return of magic" trope so there's little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not "realised"—it's left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don't know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you're looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you're reading the wrong type of fantasy.

Silly errors

Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei's name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?
George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.
enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon's Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there's no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there's no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly "enriching" for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.

what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody

[-] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 4 points 13 hours ago

"Cerisi" and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago

It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

In a surprising turn and with much hedging, George Hotz suggests that maybe LLMs are bad actually. hackernews says that he's holding it wrong.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48263238

[-] antifuchs@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago

I’m sure he is regretting his part in bringing online a major player in this fashtech fashion scene. Bet there’s a bunch of tears-wiping with dollar bills going on.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 3 points 13 hours ago

Yeaaaaaaaaaah pretty much

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 23 hours ago

At this point I'm starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!

https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-google-graduation-speech-stanford-ai-backlash-eric-schmidt

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. [...] "These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact," he added, referring to AI.

[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 12 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

They do. Not the booing itself but being an edgy contrarian. Saying "provocative" anti-human hot takes is how you one-up one another inside the cult and prove you're the edgiest, most disruptive, fastest moving breaker of things in the industry.

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago

may they enjoy their introduction(s) to tomato milkshake ducks and shiver in fear nightly at the memory of feeling unpopular

[-] lurker@awful.systems 11 points 21 hours ago

It’s jawdropping how everyone in Silicon Valley is living in their own little world where AI is the greatest invention ever and everyone should be grateful for living in the year of the AI Gods

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

don't kinkshame

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago

don’t kinkshame

Back in my day California perverts said "don't scene in public"

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

Behold, one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender (according to Yud)

[-] Jayjader@jlai.lu 7 points 23 hours ago

Ugh. Does it worry anyone else how much this fraudulent/incompetent way of claiming to be scientific resembles nazis and race science at their most fundamental workings?

[-] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago

Imagine the disappointment the rats must have felt when watching "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and wondering why all their heroes are getting their faces melted off.

[-] mawhrin@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago

it's just another fash-adjacent subculture

[-] lurker@awful.systems 7 points 23 hours ago

A lot of rationalists (again including Yudkowsky) endorse eugenics so that’s probably not a coincidence

[-] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 10 points 18 hours ago

Saying a lot of rationalists endorse eugenics is a bit like saying a lot of Nazis endorse white supremacy.

Rationalism (the online subculture, not the older philosophical meaning of the term) is a subculture predicated on a notion of "general intelligence" which is reified ableism and therefore, necessarily, entails eugenics.

this post was submitted on 24 May 2026

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