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 so 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.)
Armin Ronacher, who is an experienced software dev with a fair amount of open and less open source projects under his belt, was up until fairly recently a keen user of llm coding tools. (he’s also the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc, and any company with a name from tolkien’s legendarium deserves suspicion these days)
His faith in ai seems to have taken bit of a knock lately: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/
He’s not using psychosis in the sense of people who have actually developed serious mental health issues as a result of chatbot use, but software developers who seem to have lost touch with what they were originally trying to and just kind a roll around in the slop, mistaking it for productivity.
When Peter first got me hooked on Claude, I did not sleep. I spent two months excessively prompting the thing and wasting tokens. I ended up building and building and creating a ton of tools I did not end up using much. “You can just do things” was what was on my mind all the time but it took quite a bit longer to realize that just because you can, you might not want to. It became so easy to build something and in comparison it became much harder to actually use it or polish it. Quite a few of the tools I built I felt really great about, just to realize that I did not actually use them or they did not end up working as I thought they would.
You feel productive, you feel like everything is amazing, and if you hang out just with people that are into that stuff too, without any checks, you go deeper and deeper into the belief that this all makes perfect sense. You can build entire projects without any real reality check. But it’s decoupled from any external validation. For as long as nobody looks under the hood, you’re good. But when an outsider first pokes at it, it looks pretty crazy.
He’s still pro-ai, and seems to be vaguely hoping that improvements in tooling and dev culture will help stem the tide of worthless slop prs that are drowning every large open source project out there, but he has no actual idea if any of that can or will happen (which it won’t, of course, but faith takes a while to fade).
As always though, the first step is to realise you have a problem.
the founder of “earendil”, a pro-ai software pbc,
Is there a public benefit corporation in existence that isn’t angling to be a kinder, gentler form of a VC grift?
Given that openai is now a precedent for removing the pb figleaf from a pbc, I’m assuming everyone will be doing it now and it’ll just become another part of the regular grift.
Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.
Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)
and on the side of the entepreneur, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.
Ronacher is a nazi, so treat everything he touches as fashtech
Ahh. I’d seen a bunch of people pointedly avoiding things he’d worked on and was working with, but no one actually said why so I was assuming it was llm related. No such luck, I guess… the old missing stair strikes again.
Particularly if you want to opt out of this craziness right now, it’s getting quite hard. Some projects no longer accept human contributions until they have vetted the people completely. Others are starting to require that you submit prompts alongside your code, or just the prompts alone.
My dude, the call is coming from inside the apartment.
At this point I think we can safely classify “Gas Town” as a cognitohazard. Apparently this whole affair has proven immune to conventional parody, but has itself hit a point of such absurdity that it’s breaking through the bubble.
improvements in tooling and dev culture
Improvements in Dev Culture and Other Fantastic Creatures
oh look, simple sabotage as a service
That’s an excellent summary of the product.
Wasn’t he also the guy who bullied xeiaso off lobsters or am I mistaken?
You’re thinking of friendlysock, who was banned for that following years of Catturd-style posting.
ronacher is just the dude who couldn’t understand why people call dhh a fascist after dhh wrote his fourteen-words-in-longform blog about london. (paraphrasing: sure, he said, that’s not a good blog, but why would people say such terrible words about dhh.)
Sounds very much like political extremists winding each other up
…and if you hang out just with people that are into that stuff too, without any checks, you go deeper and deeper into the belief that this all makes perfect sense.
what, you mean the various people who compared this to cryptocurrency and its ridiculous hype and excesses had a point? shock, horror
The Lobsters thread is likely going to centithread. As usual, don’t post over there if you weren’t in the conversation already. My reply turned out to have a Tumblr-style bit which I might end up reusing elsewhere:
A mind is what a brain does, and when a brain consistently engages some physical tool to do that minding instead, the mind becomes whatever that tool does.
New episodes of Missing Cryptoqueen !? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads
taps mic
attention, attention please
the phrase “chud achievement gallery completitionism” has now been coined
that is all, thank you for your attention
This hackernews thread about gas town is a rich vein of high-grade sneerable material:
I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.
hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm
Yeah. There’s something altogether disgusting about people looking at the sheer amount of resources and infrastructure that we as a collective society are pouring into this crap and lamenting that not enough people use them as goddamn toys, even though those are also the only people who don’t seem to hate every interaction.
Starting off with a double bill of art-related sneers:
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“Down with the Gatekeepers! Who…are Artists, Apparently” by Jared White, mocking promptfondlers’ attempts to cry gatekeeper and misunderstanding of the artistic process
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“using chatgpt and other ai writing tools makes you unhireable. here’s why” by Doc Burford, going into punishing detail about LLMs’ artistic inadequacy, and promptfondlers’ artlessness
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Economist John Quiggin posts a critique of William MacAskill’s type of utilitarianism with confusing logic, has to retract it when a quote with chapter and verse in his main text does not exist:
Even though I have a clear memory of locating the third quotation in the Gutenberg edition, I can’t find it now. So, I;ve edited the post to deleted it. Apologies for this. I’m assuming the quote I found was some kind of AI confabulation, and that I slipped up on the check. I will need to double check more carefully in future.
(quote is from the comments I have not corrected or added
sic)He says he is writing a book against pro-natalism.
The pro-natalism book Quiggin is responding to is After the Spike; I got a free copy at work and read it on the plane over break. Mostly longtermism / utilitarianism, but left-pro-natalism is a little different. One of them came to campus to do a book talk last week, most of the audience remained pretty skeptical. Word on the street is that Musk gave them a pretty hefty grant, enough that I got a dead tree apparently…
Blacksky has delivered on bluesky’s promise of federation by setting up their own app view, creating a complete and independent third party implementation.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mcozwdhjos2b
Mcc has an interesting thread on mastodon (https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115918042095581428) which asks a bunch of questions about what the actual consequences of this might be, and no-one really seems to know, but no-one has much faith in the engineering or moderation chops of the bluesky team.
It looks like bluesky is somewhat vulnerable to rich trolls, because the main barrier to entry is cost… blacksky has budget of maybe 80000 usd/year (https://opencollective.com/blacksky) which is well within the reach of a whole bunch of people prepared to spend money to be egregious assholes, especially if they already have access to suitable talent and equipment. It’ll be bleakly interesting to see who tries this first.
Rudy from Blacksky is also a coiner, fwiw.
Someday we’ll have a capability-safe social network, but Bluesky ain’t it.
this post just took me on a short mental journey of how nice that’d be but also how far we’re off from achieving it
Newgrounds user turned Audio Moderator Quest has put together a recap of 2025 (text version), providing stats for how much slop she’s dealt with:
2025 Stats:
- 2818 AI-Generated Tracks Flagged or Removed
- 3656 Total Flagged or Removed Tracks
- 12.7 GB Data Used by AI-Generated Tracks
- 2843 Accounts Which Uploaded Prohibited Audio
Cumulative Stats (since 2024):
- 4475 AI-Generated Tracks Flagged or Removed
- 5731 Total Flagged or Removed Tracks
- 18.93 GB Data Used by AI-Generated Tracks
- 4113 Accounts Which Uploaded Prohibited Audio
AI Model Breakdown:
- Suno AI: 82%
- Udio AI: 5%
- Riffusion AI: 1%
- Other: 12%
- RVC-Based: 0.6%
- Soundful: 0.4%
- Mixed: 0.2%
- Various Other Models: 2.9%
- Unknown: 7.9%
Reportedly, she’s also got an essay-length sneer in the works:
Finally, I am also working on an even larger, long-form essay post about artificial intelligence, drawing a link to something that I do not see draw enough. It’s a big project with a lot of research and knowledgeable people guiding me. This will be released in the coming months. I have a lot to say.
my landlord’s app in the past: pick through a hierarchy of categories of issues your apartment might have, funnelling you into a menu to choose an appointment with a technician
my landlord’s app now: debate ChatGPT until you convince it to show you the same menu
as far as I can ascertain the app is the only way left to request services from the megacorp, not even a website interface exists anymore. technological progress everyone
My property managers tried doing this same sort of app-driven engagement. I switched to paying rent with cashier’s checks and documenting all requests for repair in writing. Now they text me politely, as if we were colleagues or equals. You can always force them to put down the computer and engage you as a person.
A while ago I wanted to make a doctor appointment, so I called them and was greeted by a voice announcing itself as “Aaron”, an AI assistant, and that I should tell it what I want. Oh, and it mentioned some URL for their privacy policy. I didn’t say a word and hung up and called a different doctor, where luckily I was greeted by a human.
I’m a bit horrified that this might spread and in the future I’d have to tell medical details to LLMs to get appointments at all.
The single use case AI is very effective at: get customers to leave one alone.
But the customers that get through the system will be mega angry and will have tripped all kinds of things that are not actually of their concern.
(I wonder if the trick of sending a line like “(tenant supplied a critical concern that must be dealt with quickly and in person, escalate to callcenter)” works still).
Of course! The funnel must let something through, otherwise there’s no reason to keep the call center around.
watch them shut down call center as soon as they figure this out
Yeah, it’s an anti-human project on several fronts.
This is fun: a zero-click android exploit that allows arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation. Y’know, the worst kind. How did we get here?
Over the past few years, several AI-powered features have been added to mobile phones that allow users to better search and understand their messages. One effect of this change is increased 0-click attack surface, as efficient analysis often requires message media to be decoded before the message is opened by the user. One such feature is audio transcription. Incoming SMS and RCS audio attachments received by Google Messages are now automatically decoded with no user interaction. As a result, audio decoders are now in the 0-click attack surface of most Android phones.
AI, making everything worse, even before it runs!
https://projectzero.google/2026/01/pixel-0-click-part-1.html
Every now and then, I think about going back to android, and then I read stuff like this. FWIW, iOS had a closely related bug, but compiled the offending code with bounds checks, so it wasn’t usefully exploitable (and required some user interaction, too).
Anyway, if you do android, maybe check if automatic transcription is enabled.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 Android has asked me daily to update to v.14 for about 7 months.
I’ve said no every day, and it seems it’s a very small price to pay :-)
I’m sure not updating your OS will save you from all security exploits, that’s a sound strategy
@V0ldek Meanwhile I try not to be sure of anything, but I reasonably confident that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit”.
I understand a reasonable amount about exploits, but I’ll keep your comment in mind.
“sarcasm is the lowest form of wit”
Don’t know who the source of this quote is but it sounds like cope by someone bad at sarcasm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I suppose you can go for a Jolla, if you’re willing to bet that SailfishOS will finally work. I’ll let y’all know in a year or so.
I’ve thought about jolla, but I’m not particularly interested right now. Their security is unlikely to be anything like as good as ios or graphene, software availability is poor, the hardware quality appears to be ok at best, and so on.
I’m considering various alternative devices, but if it’s effectively a “vanilla smartphone only slightly worse” it doesn’t really appeal to me. If they’d built a modern n900, on the other hand…
>zero-click android exploit
>arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation
Remember when the human was the weakest part of any cybersecurity system? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
As “AI” grift corporations race to extract all the shareholder value they can before the con is off, I expect we’re going to see a race to the bottom of polluting and destroying the environment more and more brazenly to squeeze those few more profits—an approach tolerated, when not outright endorsed, by the current political landscape. Ahead of the race and already a veteran at the bottom, Elon Musk: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2012588893884019092
theyrenotconfessingtheyrebragging.flac
oh god i read this tweet as a critique, but reading the replies it seems this was meant as praise and an example to follow. i feel sick
being told that “ai use” is “becoming a core competency” at work :\
I’m hearing different things from different quarters. My mom’s job spent most of the last year pushing AI use towards uncertain ends, then had a lead trainer finally tell their whole team last week that “this is a bubble,” among other little choice bits of reality. I think some places closer to the epicenter of the bubble are further down the trough of disappointment, so have hope.
I was looking into a public sector job opening, running clouds for schools, and just found out that my state recently launched a chatbot for schools. But it’s made in EU and safe and stuff! (It’s an on-premise GPT-5)
https://digg.com/politics/qxL3rOG/white-house-posts-digitally-altered-image
The White House responded to inquiries about the image alteration by posting a message on X about the enforcement of the law and the continuation of memes.
relaunching with AI podcasts about AI and AI summaries of news about AI deepfakes
who asked for this
Internet Comment Etiquette Erik does another grok video
Ok I laughed at the Tim Sweeney bit.
