this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Want to wade into the sandy 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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[–] fiat_lux@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago

In this case because it's ironically counterproductive. If it weren't for the environmental impact, it might be amusing to watch him keep hitting himself.

I tried this type of prompt a long while ago to see what the "thinking" output would reveal. What happened was the agent went and "verified" it's weightings were accurate - but having no point of comparison it obviously concluded it was correct.

However, doing that consumes a significant quantity of tokens and contributes to filling up the context window. There are two likely results to evaluating this ultimately unactionable request.

  1. It will push this instruction (and the rest of the wishful thinking) off the stack more quickly - making the prompt even more futile than it already is.
  2. Given some agents re-inject a summary of the original prompt periodically to prevent the stack problem, it will keep narrowing the context window - which contributes to increasing the rate of hallucination for the actually actionable instructions.