Want to wade into the snowy 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
People more plugged in than me in US culture war issues: is the opposition to infant male circumcision driven primarily by anti-semitism / anti-islamism or by more general manosphere vibes?
When phrased like that, they can’t be disentangled. You’ll have to ask the person whether they come from a place of hate or compassion.
content warning: frank discussion of the topic
Male genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Jews and Christians. Female genital mutilation is primarily practiced by Muslims. In Minnesota, female genital mutilation is banned. It’s widely understood that the Minnesota statutes are anti-Islamic and that they implicitly allow for the Jewish and Christian status quo. However, bodily autonomy is a relatively fresh legal concept in the USA and we are still not quite in consensus that mutilating infants should be forbidden regardless of which genitals happen to be expressed.
In theory, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) has been ratified; Mr. Biden said it’s law but Mr. Trump said it’s not. If the ERA is law then Minnesota’s statutes are unconstitutionally sexist! This analysis requires a sort of critical gender theory: we have to be willing to read a law as sexist even when it doesn’t mention sex at all. The equivalent for race, critical race theory, has been a resounding success, and there has been some progress on deconstructing gender as a legal concept too. ERA is a shortcut that would immediately reverberate throughout each state’s statutes.
The most vocal opponents of the ERA have historically been women; important figures include Alice Hamilton, Mary Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Phyllis Schafly. It’s essential to know that these women had little else in common; Schafly was a truly odious anti-feminist while Roosevelt was an otherwise-upstanding feminist.
The men’s-rights advocates will highlight that e.g. Roosevelt was First Lady, married to a pro-labor president who generally supported women’s rights; I would point out that her husband didn’t support ERA either, as labor unions were anti-ERA during that time due to a desire to protect their wages.
This entanglement is a good example of intersectionality. We generally accept in the USA that a law can be sexist and racist, simultaneously, and similarly I think that the right way to understand the discussion around genital mutilation is that it is both sexist and religiously bigoted.
Chaser: It’s also racist. C’mon, how could the USA not be racist? Minnesota’s Department of Health explicitly targets Somali refugees when discussing female genital mutilation. The original statute was introduced not merely to target Muslims, but to target Somali-American Muslim refugees.
In the same way that in France, separation of church and state sounds good on paper but means “local government will still sponsor nativity scenes but schoolchildren will be banned from wearing hijabs” in practice.
It’s driven primarily by not wanting babies’ genitals cut for no good reason. Female circumcision is considered mutilation most places, but it’s a-ok for males. I wish they didn’t cut mine off
It’s the norm for babies to be circumcised basically right after birth in the US. It’s fucking weird and unnecessary.
My friend is Canadian and had it done as an adult because of the teasing he received in US high school
Yes, not mutilating infants’ genitals is the default choice! A few nations have that custom like a few have the custom of stretching necks, or footbinding, or piercing ears. Its not even a very old custom in the USA (early 20th century I think whereas in North Africa and West Asia it goes back thousands of years).
I think it’s one of those cornflakes Victorian things that were supposed to discourage masturbating
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_generativeai-gartner-ibm-activity-7415515266849124352-W2n5
I’ve finally cracked how Gartner’s “Features” axis works.
It’s not latency.
It’s not context windows.
It’s definitely not “can this thing form a coherent thought.”
It’s Enterprise Friction™.
By that metric, Gartner has ranked IBM—a company whose flagship product is currently “billable hours in a trench coat”—ahead of Anthropic, the people who actually build the models IBM is desperately trying to resell with a logo swap.
Ranking IBM over Anthropic in 2025 is like ranking a library card catalog over Google Search because the library has better governance, stronger controls, and more shelves you can lock.
Anthropic is building the frontier.
IBM is building a PowerPoint about the frontier that requires a three-year commit, seven steering committees, and a ceremonial blood sacrifice to Red Hat.
Gartner analysts: blink twice if the blue suits are in the room with you.
Discord have a new questionnaire up, to determine how their users think about “ai”: https://discord.sjc1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5BGtstVUidXadts
In a frankly hilarious turn of events, an award-winning isekai novel had its planned book publication and manga adaptation shitcanned after it was discovered to be AI slop.
The offending isekai is still up on AlphaPolis (where it originally won said award) as of this writing. Given its isekai and AI slop, expect some primo garbage.
Been listening to the latest oxide and friends podcast (predictions 2026), and ugh, so much incoherent ai boosting.
They’re an interesting company doing interesting things with a lot of very capable and clever engineers, but every year the ai enthusiasm ramps up, to the point where it seems like they’re not even listening to the things they’re saying and how they’re a little bit contradictory… “everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”. There’s enthusing over llm law firms, without any awareness of the recent robin ai collapse. Talk of llms generating their own programming language that isn’t readily human readable but is somehow more convenient for llms to extrude, but also talking about the need for more human review of vibe code. Simon Willison is there.
I feel like there’s a certain kind of very smart and capable vibe coder who really cannot imagine how people can and are using these tools to avoid having to think or do anything, and aren’t considering what an absolute disaster this is for everything and everyone.
Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.
“everyone will be a 10x vibe coder” and “everything will be made with some level of llm assistance in the near future” vs “no-one should be letting llms access anything where they could be doing permanent damage” and “there’s so much worthless slop in crates.io”.
“The things that AI cannot do but the salespeople assure me it will In The Near Future™️ sure sound great, but the real negative effects it has right now are really bad. Gee, I wonder if there’s some bigger picture to see here, huh.”
I’m sure it’s all meant to bolster a sales pitch to corporate clients that “this is YOUR AI, that YOU CONTROL!”
I’ve been wondering, since Rust has a more complex compiler that can take longer to run, and people are typically farming it out to a build/CI server anyway… are these otherwise accomplished vibe coders like Klabnik and the Oxide bros pursuing an experience similar to the REPL/incremental compilation of Lisp or Smalltalk? We’ve already discussed how the mechanics are similar to a slot machine, but if you can convince yourself you’re getting a “liveness” that you wouldn’t otherwise get with a compiled, rigorously type-checked language, you’re probably more than willing to ignore all that. I’m curious, but not curious enough to go pin one of these people up against the wall, or start poking the slop machine myself.
Anyway, I can recommend skipping this episode and only bothering with the technical or more business oriented ones, which are often pretty good.
AI puffery is easy for anyone to see through. If they’re regularly mistaking for something of actual substance, their technical/business sense is likely worthless, too.
There’s room for some nuance there. They make some reasonable predictions, like chatbot use seems likely to enter the dsm as a contributing factor for psychosis, and they’re all experience systems programmers who immediately shot down Willison when he said that an llm-generated device driver would be fine, because device drivers either obviously work or obviously don’t, but then fall foul of the old gell-mann amnesia problem.
Certainly, their past episodes have been good, and the back catalogue stretches back quite some time, but I’m not particularly interested in that sort of discussion here.
old gell-mann amnesia problem
I didn’t know this had a name. Thank you!
@self they’re doing it again, where’s the link to your rant
It was in fact @[email protected] : https://awful.systems/post/4099363/7113212
Ugh, I carried to listening to the episode in the hopes it might get better, but it didn’t deliver.
I don’t understand how people can say, with a straight face, that ai isn’t coming for your job and it is just going to make everyone more productive. Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore), have they not noticed the vast sweeping layoffs in the tech industry alone, let alone the damage to other sectors? They seem to be aware that the promise of the bubble is that agi will replace human labour, but seem not to think any harder about that.
Also, Willison thinks that a world without work would be awful, and that people need work to give their lives meaning and purpose and bruh. I cannot even.
Even if you ignore all the externalities of providing llm services (which is a pretty serious thing to ignore)
Beyond the obvious and well-discussed material externalities, it strikes me that we don’t know and can’t yet know the true total cost of the LLM-driven development cycle. The manifestation of security holes and rewrites are possibly still years off in the future, maybe decades in the case of lower-level code. And yet, given industry practice and the mentality of most of the management strata, I have little doubt that such future costs will either a) be ignored completely and thus rendered true externalities or b) somebody else’s problem, I done got my bag, brah, see ya…
I feel like one day that “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” thing will have to give.
I figure two things will happen:
a) In a year or two companies will realize that LLMs aren’t going to improve enough, and that they need skilled people because AI has turned their software into a shit show, and start hiring desperately.
or
b) In a year or two LLMs will get good enough for code that the software developed is just good enough despite the deskilling effects, and companies can get by with drastically reduced staff.
The more likely version of b) is not that AI improves in any way, but that the definition of “good enough” gets degraded so much that no one will care.
My gloomy prediction is that (b) is the way things will go, at least in part because there are fewer meaningful consequences for producing awful software, and if you started from something that was basically ok it’ll take longer for you to fail.
Startups will be slopcoded and fail quick, or be human coded but will struggle to distinguish themselves well enough to get customers and investment, especially after the ai bubble pops and we get a global recession.
The problems will eventually work themselves out of the system one way or another, because people would like things that aren’t complete garbage and will eventually discover how to make and/or buy them, but it could take years for the current damage to go away.
I don’t like being a doomer, but it is hard to be optimistic about the sector right now.
update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.
update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users
update update update: actually they didn’t do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting
@sc_griffith @BlueMonday1984 So just making it official that rich white men can commit all the sex crimes they want but those with less privilege might be stopped or face consequences.
If that won’t sell it to governments around the world, I don’t know what will. Elon’s on to a winner with that strategy.
Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:
alt text:
Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?
I’ve had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don’t work.
They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.
I feel like I’m absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis’ because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.
I think the effect AI has had on our industry’s knowledge is really significant, and it’s honestly very scary.
Haha, wow the reactions to that, 3 levels deep and suddenly people are talking about screws. (Im being positive here btw, funny to see what people have made/learned and how happy they seem with it).
How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.
Yeah, just learned a black person was killed in the USA, and the only reason this was getting some attention was because Renee Good was also killed.
With the benefit of a sea of distance between me and the USA this is just really fucked up. Two different Americas.
There are two things here in my opinion:
- American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don’t even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
- We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there’s usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd’s murder wasn’t successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don’t even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it’d elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn’t video, just witness reports, it’d be out of the media cycle already.
* I don’t want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami’s recent words: “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty”. HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn’t actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don’t need to hide it, they don’t need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I’m sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it’s proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.
i’m a bit conflicted here: on the one hand it’s true that the american fascists are now escalating, buyoed by the feeling of being virtually untouchable, but on the other hand, this is not a distinct change of behaviour, it’s that they basically widened their target group to include white people too.
the blm protests were fueled not by new knowledge or radically changed police behaviour after all, but by the wider availability of documentation (mainly phone videos).
(and on the gripping hand, extending brutal repressions to a majority group is a sign of escalation. but that only means that a large population of u.s. residents, i.e. the non-white ones, live and have always lived in a totalitarian state; the totalitarianism just wasn’t evenly distributed until trump.)
this is not a distinct change of behaviour
This is what I disagree with. The theatrics of justifying police brutality don’t change the outcomes of police brutality – people still die – but the fact that the theatrics can now be dispensed of in favour of paramilitaries directly using violence to terrorise the people is a distinct change of behaviour towards fascism.
And I think it’s important to recognise that because, as many scholars of fascism have warned time and time again, this is not a binary where a switch get flipped and haha, since today you’re in a fascist state. It’s a progressive erosion of the social contract. ICE as deployed by the Trump regime right now is a basically textbook run: create a paramilitary force, recruit from existing criminal militias to select for loyalists and violent personalities, normalise them as keepers of order, push out or integrate any other enforcement structures so that the paramilitary becomes dominant. Basically the only difference is that Trump didn’t have to create ICE, it was already there just waiting to be pushed through the pipeline.
Does this event fundamentally change how you and I perceive America? No, if you were paying attention you knew the rot inside, and you’ve been shouting that Trump is a fascist since the very beginning. It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.
It is, however, a sign that the situation is much worse than it was months ago, that fascism is progressing, and if this is the point at which someone not paying attention wisens up and goes “shit, we are moving towards a totalitarian nightmare” then good, welcome, grab a pitchfork.
oh, i’m not a pitchfork purist. anyone is welcome to grab one at any time.
The OpenAI Psychosis Suicide Machine now has a medical spinoff, which automates HIPAA violations so OpenAI can commit medical malpractice more efficiently
Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?
Nearly laughed out loud in a waiting room
Too late, I already put it on the blockchain.
P0 blocker: USAian memory management suffers from multiple holes and transactional consistency issues
Prior attempts haven’t worked, closing LOLBUG
maybe memory safety would help people remember what letting fascists run things tends to do to your country?
I’d personally just overthrow the US government and make it a British colony once more /j
brexit would look wild in that timeline
Breconstruction
You should probably read “Monarchy Considered Harmful” (1776)
Edit: sorry I’ll behave now
Edit: sorry I’ll behave now
promises promises… ;p
;D
PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @[email protected]) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
Are there any resources(read: sneers) on cardano*? I have a family member who is into that shit.
* Cardano specifically I mean, I am already aware of the extensive literature on crypto in general
It’s a very elaborate parkour trick in Haskell that through piles and piles or rigorous category theory manages to achieve Nothing in a type-safe manner.
here’s mine on their foray into smart contracts https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/09/06/news-the-eos-ico-was-a-fake-pump-cardano-smart-contracts-fail-cycling-vs-nexthash-microstrategy-de-indexed-el-salvador-live-tomorrow/
cardano is a shitcoin for traders to trade like a shitcoin and it pretends being written in Haskell by a mathematician who failed to get his degree, lied about going into a Ph.D program and claimed to have worked for DARPA but did not makes it very interesting and not just a shitcoin. this turns out not to be the case.
if a family member is into cardano nothing will get through. charles is a mathematical genius you see.
but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
Urbit moment
David Futurelle of We Hunted the Mammoth fame has started a new project, Brotopians:
Futrelle was an AI guy for a bit, weirdly.
OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
Fuck, sorry :( internet hugs available if desired
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago.
my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
💔
Sorry man, at least his suffering is through
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
Sorry for you and your cat.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day
