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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 5 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.)

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Wonder what would have happened if they had not stopped after 31 tries. Sure it gave a goodish answer once, but was that just a luck of the draw? A proper evaluation imho shouldnt stop when you get a good answer once, esp as bad results tend to not get published. (Also, as always somebody might have found the answer already online).

It is also silly in some ways as I wonder how hard it is for people to evaluate the 31 results and not get stuck in pursuing an earlier false lead.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

The 31st try resulted in them only solving the problem for odd m, but the even m case was still open. So of course this happened:

Filip also told me that he asked Claude to continue on the even case after the odd case had been resolved. “But there after a while it seemed to get stuck. In the end, it was not even able to write and run explore programs correctly anymore, very weird. So I stopped the search.”

Knuth did add a postscript on other friends maybe kinda vibing a possible solution for even m:

On March 3, Stappers wrote me as follows: “The story has a bit of a sequel. I put Claude Opus 4.6 to work on the m = even cases again for about 4 hours yesterday. It made some progress, but not a full solution. The final program . . . sets up a partial fiber construction similar to the odd case, then runs a search to fix it all up. . . . Claude spent the last part of the process mostly on making the search quicker instead of looking for an actual construction. . . . It was running many programs trying to find solutions using simulated annealing or backtrack. After I suggested to use the ORTools CP-SAT [part of Google’s open source toolkit, with the AddCircuit constraint] to find solutions, progress was better, since now solutions could be found within seconds.” This program is [4].

Then on March 4, another friend — Ho Boon Suan in Singapore — wrote as follows: “I have code generated by gpt-5.3-codex that generates a decomposition for even m ≥ 8. . . . I’ve tested it for all even m from 8 to 200 and bunch of random even values between 400 and 2000, and it looks good. Seems far more chaotic to prove correctness by hand here though; the pattern is way more complex.” That program is [5]. (Wow. The graph for m = 2000 has 8 billion vertices!)

I find it slightly funny how Stappers suggested to the AI to use specific external tools that are actually reliable (like ORTools). This also makes me question how much the of the AI's "insight" was a result of handholding and the rubber duck effect.

For context:

This is planned as a hard exercise for a textbook.
There are likely so many solutions that finding a general program that works (at least for enough values that you care to check) is like hitting the side of a barn with an arrow. Random bullshit go is an excellent strategy here.
The AIs did not provide proofs that their solutions worked. This is kind of a problem if you want to demonstrate that AI has understanding.