TechTakes

1489 readers

77 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

[email protected]

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 6 October 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

307 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

(page 5) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

nasb, fedi is for losers

been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc

one of the things I've been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don't think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I've said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them

but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven't really been able to estimate

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Im reminded of the "Rationalism is systematized winning". Post for some reason. This post and the recent musk chess post just makes me wonder about "what does winning" even mean. But in the spirit of wargames, i have not thought about it much more than that.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (7 replies)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Folks, I need some expert advice. Thanks in advance!

Our NSF grant reviews came in (on Saturday), and two of the four reviews (an Excellent AND a Fair, lol) have confabulations and [insert text here brackets like this] that indicate that they are LLM generated by lazy people. Just absolutely gutted. It's like an alien reviewed a version of our grant application from an parallel dimension.

Who do I need to contact to get eyes on the situation, other than the program director? We get to simmer all day today since it was released on the weekend, so at least I have an excuse to slow down and be thoughtful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I haven't had to report malfeasance like that, but if that happened to me, I would be livid. I'd start by contacting the program officer; I'd also contact the division director above them and the NSF Office of Inspector General. I mean, that level of laziness can't just have affected one review! And, for good measure, I'd send a tip to 404media, as they have covered this sort of thing. That might well go nowhere, but it can't hurt to be in their contact list.

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The Bookseller tried to hawk AI to its readerbase and they are not having it - they're getting ratioed hard:

bookseller tweet

bookseller ratio

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments