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Want to wade into the snowy 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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[-] anise@quokk.au 8 points 1 day ago

He knows how LLMs work, right? This really is just cope because he got called out for being weird about using them. Really fucking disappointing

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In the original post he kept referring to Ollama like it was an LLM instead of a server app that hosts LLMs so I'd say the jury's out on that.

edit: Also, throughout this piece he keeps equivocating between local LLMs and their behemoth online counterparts with their heavily proprietary tooling that occasionally wraps them into a somewhat useful product.

I think he assumes that because he can load up a modest speech-to-text model locally and casually transcribe several hours of video resources in somewhat short order (this was apparently his major formative experience with modern AI) it works the same with e.g. coding.

Like, hey gpt-oss please make sense of these ten thousand lines of context without access to a hundred bespoke MCP intermediaries and one or three functioning RAG systems as I watch the token generation rate slow to a trickle while the context window gradually fills up.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 2 points 1 day ago

This really seems to be the case.

[-] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 4 points 1 day ago

@o7___o7 @anise

Hey, can't get that SXSW London (a truly cursed event, but I digress) bag unless you're willing to say LLMs Are Good, Actually

https://www.sxswlondon.com/speakers/cory-doctorow-20bb9390

[-] samvines@awful.systems 1 points 6 hours ago

Interestingly this 404s now. I wonder if he withdrew

this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
13 points (88.2% liked)

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