this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025

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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (6 children)

In other news, Discord's jumped on the AI bandwagon, and users are Not Happy^tm^:

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (3 children)

new zitron dropped https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

These are also — and I do not believe there are any use cases that justify this — not a counterbalance for the ruinous financial and environmental costs of generative AI. It is the leaded gasoline of tech, where the boost to engine performance didn’t outweigh the horrific health impacts it inflicted.

ed reads techtakes? i wonder how far this analogy disseminated

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

any of y'all running short on your supply of really tortured sentences? no worries, I've got a supply drop

What will count, he says, is industrial revolution-style irreversible growth.

While AI is improving fast, it remains wildly flawed

Moreover, a recent Eye on the Market [PDF] report by Michael Cembalest, chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management, questions whether the immense investments in AI and the infrastructure required to support it, already made or committed by the tech giants, will ever pay off

that paragraph doesn't punch very hard, but the (2024) pdf that it links to starts out with this as a bolded title line:

A severe case of COVIDIA: prognosis for an AI-driven US equity market

which, well, 1) immensely tortured sentence, 2) "aww poor baby, etc etc"

entertained by the rapid fire "hmm, shit, is all this worth it?" that's Ever So Suddenly boiling up everywhere. bet it's entirely unrelated to people working on quarterly portfolio reviews, tho

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (9 children)

I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:

weirdly extremely into everything red hat
outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

as in, distro for normal people? (for arbitrary value of normal, that is) distrowatch ranks mint #1, and i also use it because i'm lazy and while i could use something else, It Just Works™

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

that’s the one I ended up grabbing, and from the setup-only usage I’ve been giving it, it’s surprisingly good

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

So they had the new Claude hooked up to some tools so that it could play Pokemon red. Somewhat impressive (at least to me!) It was able to beat lt surge after several days of play. They had a stream demo'ing it on twitch and despite the on paper result of getting 3 gym badges, poor fellas got stuck in Viridian forest trying to find the exit to the maze.

As far as finding the exit goes... I guess you could say he was stumped? (MODS PLEASE DONT BAN)

strim if anyone is curious. Yes, i know this is clever advertising for anthropic, but i do find it cute and maybe someone else will?