this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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TechTakes

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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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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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[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 1 points 45 minutes ago* (last edited 42 minutes ago)

Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time

In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.

Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 7 hours ago

Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.

[–] fnix@awful.systems 11 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.

For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).

Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 8 points 9 hours ago

but I do know that what's available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.

Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.

It's telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, it's so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?

[–] TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systems 6 points 19 hours ago (4 children)
[–] pewnack@aus.social 2 points 2 hours ago

@TinyTimmyTokyo

'This post is for "members" only'

Oh, I'm sure it is.

@BlueMonday1984

[–] WellsiteGeo@masto.ai 2 points 11 hours ago

@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984
The Romans answered that one : live donkey.

"Best" for what purposes, and for whom?

[–] arfisk@aus.social 2 points 15 hours ago

@TinyTimmyTokyo @BlueMonday1984

No mention of swede suppositories?

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 19 hours ago

Fuck, I was just about to post that. You beat me to the sneer

chatbots doing normal chatbot things

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (28 children)

EDIT:

I'm removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.

It's quite embarrasing, I should've been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it's saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!

That's what you get from reposting someone who has "The Finance Newsletter" in his fucking username, couldn't have gone well for me.

original post

From https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3mek7wsqgkk26

Microsoft released a study showing the 40 jobs most at risk by AI:

Tag the most ridiculous entry, I am curious of your choices.

To me it has to be fucking historians. Arriving at new conclusions by looking at available evidence and/or finding obscure references that are not well known to the public -- CLASSIC THING LLMS ARE GOOD AT.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 21 hours ago

Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar

[–] janxdevil@sfba.social 5 points 22 hours ago

@V0ldek Mathematicians.

Tell me you have no idea what mathematicians do by publishing an absolute mockery of mathematics purporting to explain that mathematicians are likely to be replaced by LLMs.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 5 points 23 hours ago

I remember this paper from last summer, the authors put up a followup right when school started that distances it from the AI replacement theory: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/

I work a lot with the underlying data set they used, ONET is really carefully designed but easy to misinterpret; and also I wanted to mention that it is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been DOGE'd since then. Future research into jobs, AI or regular, will probably degrade as this continues.

[–] katfeete@wandering.shop 4 points 22 hours ago

@V0ldek “Farm and Home Management Educators”

WTF

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

before you order the cavalry charge, fwiw this skeet misrepresents the actual study topic rather badly, as another bluesky commenter notes.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago
[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

this doesn't mean that the paper is any good or doesn't deserve mockery (i don't know, i didn't read it yet, and i'm not sure i have apparatus to make other than esthetic judgements), just that the conclusions the og skeet author attributes to the paper aren't the paper's conclusions.

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"these ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industry"

CNC Tool Programmer is a good one and shows that Microsoft, a company that probably has paid for someone to run CNC tooling for prototyping AND supposedly makes software, didn't do the bare minimum to understand complexeties involved by talking to that someone.

Yeah, you can make mistakes with programming this thing, it'll happily destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling as well as potentially maiming or killing anyone standing too close while the machine is actually physically crashing. It will friction-weld your nice, expensive carbide cutting tool with cooling channels to your work piece (even if they are dissimler metals) by taking too big of a cut because it does exactly as it's instructed.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (3 children)

someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they'd tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)

some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 4 points 21 hours ago

I do believe that's literally how the automation dystopia began in Vonnegut's Player Piano.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 23 hours ago

some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs

I expected a willingness from HN users to backstab the working class, but I didn't expect something this blatantly half-baked.

10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.

That's not just smart, that's capital-J Jenius.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

Passenger Attendants

Hosts and Hostesses

Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.

LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong

[–] driusan@doomscroller.social 3 points 23 hours ago

@V0ldek@awful.systems @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems I see how you might find historians ridiculous but have you considered.. proofreaders?

[–] blind_mapmaker@eldritch.cafe 3 points 23 hours ago

@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Archivists are less at risk than historians? Quality thought went into this.

Also mathematicians - have they seen how LLMs "solve" problems.

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago (8 children)
[–] nightsky@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Even if you've never heard of him before and know nothing else about him... this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago

Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago

fuck this tweet and fuck yud

[–] lurker@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

in follow-up posts he talks about how he’s broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that “if it were a 1950’s government and congress I’d be more hopeful”

…so instead of proposing a solution like “protest against this” or “vote people in power who actually are responsible” he jumps to “your daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholders”

with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 21 hours ago

The idea that a government from the actual McCarthy Era would be adept at handling an organized labor response to massive upheaval in the job market is... what's the superlative of "lolz"?

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago

Groan, you don't need to finish high school to learn about false dichotomy.

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