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.)
Sex pest billionaire Travis Kalanick says AI is great for more than just vibe coding. It’s also great for vibe physics.
@TinyTimmyTokyo He has more dollars than sense, as they say. (Funnier if you say it out loud)
@blakestaceyMy guess is that vibe-physics involves bruteforcing a problem until you find a solution. That method sorta works, but is wholly inefficient and rarely robust/general enough to be useful.
If infinite monkeys with typewriters can compose Shakespeare, then infinite monkeys with slop machines can produce Einstein (but you need to pump in infinite amounts of money first into my CodeMonkeyfy startup, just in case).
Nah, he’s just talking to an LLM.
“I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”
And I don’t think you can brute force physics in general, having to experimentally confirm or disprove every random-ass intermediary hypothesis the brute force generator comes up with seems like quite the bottle neck.
For sure. There’s an infinite amount of ways to get things wrong in math and physics. Without a fundamental understanding, all they can do is prompt-fondle and roll dice.
They are not even rolling the dice. The bot is just humoring them, it apparently just defaults to eventually going ‘you are close to the edge of what is, known, well done keep going’.
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
thinking about how often code will be like
[-1] * len(array) # -1 is a place holder because I don't know the vocabulary term "sentinel value"and justified because “it just needs to work”
and now we have professional vibe coders
New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting “The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI”
I’m kind of half looking forward to every soda being sweetened with aspartame or acesulfame potassium, so I can finally quit drinking them. Perhaps blue food might indirectly help people like me eat healthier for a while. Thanks, torment nexus.
https://xcancel.com/jasonlk/status/1946069562723897802
Vibe Coding Day 8,
I’m not even out of bed yet and I’m already planning my day on @Replit.
Today is AI Day, to really add AI to our algo.
[…]
If @Replit deleted my database between my last session and now there will be hell to pay
I’d be lying if I said the randomly generated narrative the LLM is stringing together isn’t hilarious.
“I panicked and ran database commands without permission.”
“I destroyed all production data.”
“You immediately said ‘No’, '‘Stop’, ‘You didn’t even ask.’”
“But it was already too late.”
Thread on this lying bullshit
I feel like this response is still falling for the trick on some level. Of course it’s going to “act contrite” and talk about how it “panicked” because it was trained on human conversations and while that no doubt included a lot of Supernatural fanfic the reinforcement learning process is going to focus on the patterns of a helpful asistant rather than a barely-caged demon. That’s the role it’s trying to play and the work it’s cribbing the script from includes a whole lot of shitposts about solving problems with “rm -rf /”
their story is so incoherent, i can’t even tell if there was a database to begin with
also great: the promptfondlers unrapidly rediscovering why source control management exists and is desired
Saw this, was going to post this a literal minute before you did but stared into this abyss a little too long.
Here’s what the abyss revealed:
- Guy is fucking stupid
- Guy is fucking stupid, hence the AI use
- Guy is fucking stupid, AI accidentally his whole database and he is still an AI glazer
Can’t wait to see this guy just use a different but same tool to delete his shit again, and learn nothing
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.
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 the fact 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.
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.
Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style
Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat, advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled “TURDFEST 2025”. Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.
Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
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.
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.
What in the world is a catturd2 public appearance like, anyway? This sad, drunk old loser shouting random slurs at the crowd?
I can answer that, as turdstock 2024 is on yt, it seems this john rich guy talking about how much he likes catturd, begging for donations (while saying fema is bad), some people spending a lot of time saying nothing (I’m skimming past and there is so much nothing being said), and some country songs (which is not my genre, did notice that for one guy the mix was off, making the music/singing bad to hear, so well done tech team there (they fix it later but still)). And then I saw the audience (they also said millions watched catturd 2023, which considering this vid has 9k views, and there are like 100 people in the audience I doubt (checked turdstock 2023, which seems to only be on rumble 223k views. So lol, double lol, saw the same fucking artists (and the for the same guy the technical issues, poor guy) (and wow rumble sucks compared to yt)). There actually also don’t seem to be that many songs, think half the time was people talking. Also, No Catturd appearance from what I can tell (E: he is there, he just doesn’t do anything it seems, he prob speaks a few minutes I guess). Also really weird bit about how somebody send a mean facebook post and facebook went ‘are you sure this is mean’ and they went all ‘zuck was never punched in the face on the playground … the founding fathers … there was a patriot girl … [5 minutes of talking] … when those redcoats moved on us … etc (this bit took 20 minutes between songs)’. There is also a guy praying for various things on stage, angry raised catholic noises
But yes, can’t judge it on the music, as an event it seemed boring as fuck, too much talking, not enough music, boring audience (none of who were holding drinks), weird political message. Rather watch Kreator for 4 hours, which considering some of the speech clips I hear, seems to be the message they were going for. Somehow the geriatrics in the audience are the most dangerous people because they only want to be left alone (??). No lightshow, no stage presence, no skulls, no fireworks (this is both a comment on the lack of fireworks, and a general comment on what I saw).
Anyway, seems my initial feeling of massive uncool stands.
Also seem they reused the slash cat AI image for 2025.Nope different cat, just same AI slop shit.E: “Ticket Price: $199 plus taxes and fees.” WHAT Wacken metalfest costs 333,00 € and that is for a whole weekend (and actually has a real Slash).
lol holy shit
Thank you for your service!
What is esp interesting is how they make this event sound bigger than it is. The venue is small, but that makes the ‘it was sold out’ show up sooner (also less hard to find enough people who would chuck down 200 bucks for this shit), but then they make claims about the livestream numbers. (which are going to be hard to check) etc. Weird sort of radicalization way to make people think there are more people in their movement than there are. Bit like going ‘catturd2 has 4m followers!’ like those numbers mean much online, esp on zombie twitter (see also John Rich has 150k subs on yt, but averages to 10k plays per non-music video at a quick glance (his music songs do very well however at millions per views (the one song I listened to was also about how Jesus was coming back soon to punish all the evildoers))), so people like the music+message in the music, but not when the guy actually opens his mouth for other stuff, all very vibes stuff. But also just how few actual music is being played vs people making nonsense talks about America/whatever. (and also listening to his live performance, I don’t think John Rich is a good musician (at least not live, the yt clips of him are pretty good, so either he was having a bad day, or autotune stuff).
And it wasn’t that hard, not like I spend that much time on it, it is quite interesting in a way, to look at these kinds of movements and try to see past their propganda and notice who they actually reach and what they do and say. And considering the people they attracted it feels very much a last attempt from a dying generation whos sun has set. (but that could also just be because younger people aren’t as easily scammed into giving away 200 bucks for this).
Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl
truth in advertising: they’re hinting what the music will sound like
Fucking monodactyl ass cat
I had to attend a presentation from one of these guys, trying to tell a room full of journalists that LLMs could replace us & we needed to adapt by using it and I couldn’t stop thinking that an LLM could never be a trans journalist, but it could probably replace the guy giving the presentation.
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.
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.
rsyslog goes “AI first”, for what reason? no one knows.
Opening ipython greeted me with this: “Tip: IPython 9.0+ has hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.”
I wish open source projects would stop doing this.
It’s extremely annoying everywhere. GitHub’s updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.
For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? It’s amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only bother’s to tell me about their revolutionary features of “please spam me with useless PRs” and… make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?
ugh, why would i want a summary of a pull request? the whole point of reviewing a pull request is checking the details to make sure it’s not missing something important or doing something wrong.
My favorite static site generator, Marmite, is now making Special Accomodations for AI bros by making a context file? The dev is also making all of his PRs with Claude.
Anyone have any recommendations for replacements?
Vegemite?
I’ll get my coat.
I don’t know static site generators, but I took a look at your site and the text doesn’t render! The font file appears to not be good. Also sorry for having to move to another software.
I’m working on it! Hopefully it’ll be legible sometime this week.
the announcement post is obviously LLM-generated as well
thescream.tiff
rsyslog goes “AI first”
what
Thanks for the “from now on stay away from this forever” warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (“how AI is shaping the future of logging”), I have to remind myself it’s a syslog daemon.
I would’ve stan’d syslog-ng but they’ve also been pulling some fuckery with docs again lately that’s making me anxious, so I’m very :|||||
Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source
Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I’m not sure it can recover from.
I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.
that and deluge of fake bug reports
The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSS’ capacity to find and fix bugs.
Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by “a vicious cycle leading to collapse”, and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:
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Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.
yeah but have you considered how much it’s worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???
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Don’t know if LLMs will kill OSS, but they sure are a kick-in-the-dick
nasb, new torres piece out, promising title and opening
(I’ll have to read it after done with my present other currency-related diversions. old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud.gif)
I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.
I think it’s a better way of framing things than the TESCREALs themselves use, but it still falls into the same kind of science fiction bucket imo. Like, the technology they’re playing with is nowhere near close to the level of full brain emulation or mind-machine interface or whatever that you would need to make the philosophical concerns even relevant. I fully agree with what Torres is saying here, but he doesn’t mention that the whole affair is less about building the Torment Nexus and more about deflecting criticism away from the real and demonstrable costs and harms of the way AI systems are being deployed today.
I like how quoting Grimes lyrics makes the banality of these people thuddingly clear.
I wanna be software The best design Infinite princess Computer mind
Substituting this for the text whenever I see Sammy Boy say something again
I’ve always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I’m the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he’s saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that’s just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.
Those opening Peter Thiel quotes… Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.
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/
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.
also here https://awful.systems/post/4995759
The long and short of it is motherjones discovered TPOs openly nazi alt.
Fucking hell. Not the most important part of the story, but his elaborate lies about being Jewish are very very weird. Kind of like white Americans pretending that they’re Cherokee I guess?
It’s not that weird when you understand the sharks he swims with. Race pseudoscientists routinely peddle the idea that Ashkenazi Jews have higher IQs than any other ethnic or racial group. Scoot Alexander and Big Yud have made this claim numerous times. Lasker pretending to be a Jew makes more sense once you realize this.
I’m aware of the idea, but it’s still very weird for someone to pretend to be Jewish and also be a Nazi!
New post from Matthew Hughes: People Are The Point, effectively a manifesto against gen-AI as a concept.
Haven’t really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI or Anthropic) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.
