Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week 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] 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

OpenAI claims that their AI can get a gold medal on the International Mathematical Olympiad. The public models still do poorly even after spending hundreds of dollars in computing costs, but we've got a super secret scary internal model! No, you cannot see it, it lives in Canada, but we're gonna release it in a few months, along with GPT5 and Half-Life 3. The solutions are also written in an atrociously unreadable manner, which just shows how our model is so advanced and experimental, and definitely not to let a generous grader give a high score. (It would be real interesting if OpenAI had a tool that could rewrite something with better grammar, hmmm....) I definitely trust OpenAI's major announcements here, they haven't lied about anything involving math before and certainly wouldn't have every incentive in the world to continue lying!

It does feel a little unfortunate that some critics like Gary Marcus are somewhat taking OpenAI's claims at face value, when in my opinion, the entire problem is that nobody can independently verify any of their claims. If a tobacco company released a study about the effects of smoking on lung cancer and neglected to provide any experimental methodology, my main concern would not be the results of that study.

Edit: A really funny observation that I just thought of: in the OpenAI guy's thread, he talks about how former IMO medalists graded the solutions in message #6 (presumably to show that they were graded impartially), but then in message #11 he is proud to have many past IMO participants working at OpenAI. Hope nobody puts two and two together!

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

This result has me flummoxed frankly. I was expecting Google to get a gold medal this year since last year they won a silver and were a point away from gold. In fact, Google did announce after OAI that they had won gold.

But the OAI claim is that they have some secret sauce that allowed a “pure” llm to win gold and that the approach is totally generic- no search or tools like verifiers required. Big if true but ofc no one else is allowed to gaze at the mystery machine. It is hard for me to take them seriously given their sketchy history, yet the claim as stated has me shooketh.

Also funny aside, the guy who lead the project was poached by the zucc. So he’s walking out the front door with the crown jewels lmaou.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

Good poetic sneer: https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

janitorai - which seems to be a hosting site for creepy AI chats - is blocking all UK visitors due to the OSA

https://blog.janitorai.com/posts/3/

I'm torn here, the OSA seems to me to be massive overreach but perhaps shielding limeys from AI is wroth it

[-] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style

Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat. This cursed critter is advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled "TURDSTOCK 2025". Also, the cat doesn't appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Intentionally being on Broadway at 1-4 PM on a Sunday is a whole vibe, and that's before considering whatever the fuck this is.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The whole thing screams old people desperately trying to be edge and cool but missing all the signifiers. A 'bad'word but baby talk style (like a young child saying poop), reference to slash which was already dated when I was young, the time of day so people can arrive home early and still make dinner (and not late at night like the cool music thing). The headliner is a twitter microceleb and not an actual cool band. But hey, at least kid rock isnt attending, so it escapes the 100% poser feeling.

E: saw this on my bsky, the guy is such a sad loser.

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[-] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Found a good security-related sneer in response to a low-skill exploit in Google Gemini (tl;dr: "send Gemini a prompt in white-on-white/0px text"):

I've got time, so I'll fire off a sidenote:

In the immediate term, this bubble's gonna be a goldmine of exploits - chatbots/LLMs are practically impossible to secure in any real way, and will likely be the most vulnerable part of any cybersecurity system under most circumstances. A human can resist being socially engineered, but these chatbots can't really resist being jailbroken.

In the longer term, the one-two punch of vibe-coded programs proliferating in the wild (featuring easy-to-find and easy-to-exploit vulnerabilities) and the large scale brain drain/loss of expertise in the tech industry (from juniors failing to gain experience thanks to using LLMs and seniors getting laid off/retiring) will likely set back cybersecurity significantly, making crackers and cybercriminals' jobs a lot easier for at least a few years.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/us8ss79mWCgTcSKoK/a-night-watchman-asi-as-a-first-step-toward-a-great-future

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

I expect the time right around when the first ASI gets built to be chaotic, unstable, and scary

Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

Daniel Koko's trying to figure out how to stop the AGI apocalypse.

How might this work? Install TTRPG afficionados at the chip fabs and tell them to roll a saving throw.

Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don't roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.

And if that doesn't work? Koko ultimately ends up pretty much where Big Yud did: bombing the fuck out of the fabs and the data centers.

"For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes."

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

As a worker in the semiconductor space, I suddenly feel the urge to write a 100k word blog post about how a preemptive strike against LW is both necessary and morally correct.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Weird Al impersonator sprinkling Pentium 3's over the corpses as a calling card

[-] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

Suppose further that enough powerful people are concerned about the poverty in Ireland, anti-catholic discrimination, food insecurity, and/or loss of rental revenue, that there's significant political will to Do Something. Should we ban starvation? Should we decolonise? Should we export their produce harder to finally starve Ireland? Should we sign some kind of treaty? Should we have a national megaproject to replace the population with the British? Many of these options are seriously considered.

Enter the baseline option: Let the Irish sell their babies as a delicacy.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Funnily enough, there are a lot of data centres in Ireland. Maybe there will be a missile strike and Ireland's population will shrink back to 19th century numbers

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

For example, if a country turns out to have a hidden datacenter somewhere, the datacenter gets hit by ballistic missiles and the country gets heavy sanctions and demands to allow inspectors to pore over other suspicious locations, which if refused will lead to more missile strikes.

"If the AI God doesn't kill you, we will." is one hell of a sales pitch.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

Similarly, at the chip production facilities, a committee of representatives stands at the end of the production line basically and rolls a ten-sided die for each chip; chips that don’t roll a 1 are destroyed on the spot.

Ah, yes, artificially kneecap chip fabs' yields, I'm sure that will go over well with the capitalist overlords who own them

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I spend a lot of my professional life modeling this kind of data. My wafers having to make will saves is going to complicate things…

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

Someone didn't get the memo about nVidia's stock price, and how is Jensen supposed to sign more boobs if suddenly his customers all get missile'd?

[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

The sanctions and inspections idea is so silly esp after what the USA/Trump did to Iran. (I mean the deciding that Iran wasnt keeping their end of the bargain and still making Uranium. So after the end Iran started to make more Uranium for real. Gg everyone).

Also 'cull the gpus': [angry gamer noises]

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I'm not gonna advocate for it to happen but I'm pretty sure the world would be overall in a much healthier place geopolitically if someone actually started yeeting missiles into major American cities and landmarks. It's too easy to not really understand the human impact of even a successful precision strike when the last times you were meaningfully on the other end of the airstrike were ~20 and ~80 years ago, respectively.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago

You thought Crémieux (Jordan Lasker) was bad. You were wrong. He's even worse. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan-lasker-mamdani-nyt-nazi-faliceer-reddit/

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

The whole internet loves Éspèrature Trouvement, the grumpy old racist! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the racist is not that old and actually has a pretty normal name. Also don't look up his runescape username.