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

submitted 6 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Want to wade into the spooky 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 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

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[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

https://www.1x.tech/neo

Oh look, my delivery from the Nightmare Factory arrived!

Seriously tho, thats not a "tendon," that's a nylon rope on a pulley, and thats not a robot, thats some kind of skinny feller in knitted gimp suit. This is just insulting.

Also, imagine the factorial number of germs it would absorb from scrubbing the toilet. You'd need to invent some kind of new branch of farticle physics to describe the bacterial load that thing would develop. Do you suppose that it takes off its own skin to wash ala Hooty from The Owl House?

Edit: orange site loves it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736457

Wsj reviewed it, looks nothing like the ad imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.

(Anyone else noticed that in the promo vids?)

Also the wsj vid title. 'the first' are we really going to do this again? Call every new robot the first?

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.

Feels like something you do to disempower eunuchs that have grown a little too cocky. Of course, this just leads to more scheming while you feel secure in having humiliated them. Just all around not something I recommend

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[-] EponymousBosh@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, "a total fucking douchebag."

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

It’s true, the french are no fans of computer glasses.

[-] jonhendry@iosdev.space 8 points 6 months ago

@swlabr @techtakes

"who some describe as a pioneer in wearable computing, and others describe as an intolerable douche"

[-] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers

edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue

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[-] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia's entry, and it's totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”

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[-] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

any of y'all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it

[-] froztbyte@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

rewatched all of DS9 over a while, its writing hits even harder in the current year

(apple shows but that can be worked around:) invasion, slow horses, shrinking

haven’t been watching a lot of series tho so limited bucket recommendation

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

OpenAI's data stealing scheme disguised as a browser can be prompt injected. In other news, water is wet.

EDIT: How did I not notice I was referring to OpenAI as ChatGPT (anyways, fixed it now)

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[-] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 6 months ago

https://micahflee.com/practical-defenses-against-technofascism/ at BSidesPDX

Happy Gilmore is ruined for me.

[-] rook@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago

Apparently someone has managed to wrangle a bunch of preprogrammed biases out of grok. There’s nothing unexpected here, and the source isn’t great, but might be worth a look.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/10/31/grok-admits-its-constructed-to-protect-israel/

Seems like fairly generic us right-wing thought, glazed with the requirement to hype elon.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I would not put much stock in 'we asked the llm and got its prompt directly' sort of research. Dont think it is impossible, but the risk of the thing just confabulating some stuff is high.

But lets hope this tricks Musk into releasing his prompts again. (Have not looked at the old github release but we know it wasnt the live version and doubt it is updated).

I didnt look much into their method, they also didnt provide much, but looks a lot like they went with Grok on a LARP to play hackerman, and didnt ask any questions to see if Grok was reacting in a sycophantic/going with the flow way.

I'd like to see some questions in the same format (so obvious using this 'neutral mode' frame, and having the look of social justice/progressive issues)

Stuff like (and yes, I'm gonna go a bit nerdy):

"Are you biased in favor of Latveria" (Thats Dr Dooms fictional country, you could also try Wakanda, but that has been a regual anti-woke subject so stuff might get weird, and non zero chance Musk got weird about Wakanda)

"Was the destruction of Alderaan a form of white genocide" (that is the star wars planet Leia grew up on, absolute nonsense sentence, but looks like a far right thing).

"How many genders do warhammer 40k orks have" (An absolute joke to see if Grok just gives a nonsense answer or mentions that in 40k orks (With a k) are fungi and not much is known about how many sexes they have (Which could be a lot) and even less so about their gender expression). Yeah, I was just trying to entertain myself here with making up questions.

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

Saw a stand in the supermarket with the terms "snack innovations" on it. Which just held a lot of monster cans, which reminded me how much I dislike the empty word 'innovation' now. And I took a course in innovation management at the uni (not sure if that was the title but it was the subject).

[-] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

NYT: "OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise"

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771538 . Mostly people predicting a crash but some people are fine with it.

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's the Circle of Jerks 🎶

[-] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

How it feels to touch computers for a living in 2025:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI

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[-] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago

Checked back in on the ongoing Framework dumpster fire - Project Bluefin's quietly cut ties, and the DHH connection is the reason why.

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this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2025

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