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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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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[–] 14 points 8 hours ago (1 child)

there are tons of issues here. almost impossible to convey how bad things are. in no particular order:

  1. this research breakthrough was a consequence of dumping tons of money into the ai companies. if the future of the field means being entangled with openai et al. and extreme expenses that is going to upend mathematics in a much bigger way than ability to prove new things will. this hasn't been a focal point of discussion yet but it looks to be at the center of mathematics going forward imo.

  2. possibly for legal reasons, the statement stops short of accusing openai of stealing their in progress work. as in literally snaking their documents off the cloud and using them to try to undercut researchers. but it's very clear that that is what the author believes happened

  3. openai straight up threatened the mathematician in question. in a colloquial sense they're engaging in extortion. apparently this is so routine for them that they didn't even stop to consider that they can't threaten an academic's career (or they assumed the mathematician would understand there will be no academic careers in the future)

  4. openai is straight up lying about their research methods. there are various ways that their announcements have had the potential to be misleading (for example when you see "we spent $2000 to compute these proofs" ask how much they spent on attempts that didn't work). but what they're saying may generally just not be true even in a literal sense

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 4 hours ago

    OpenAI:

    While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.

    https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v

    lmao what the fuck do you mean it's unlikely but you can't rule it out. do you not know what you're training your models on? are you guys unaware of what's going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?

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