this post was submitted on 21 Jun 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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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 7 hours ago

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/untenable-middle-ground-responsible-ai-use-emily-m-bender-8jyfc/

So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as "AI". If you don't call the stuff you work with "AI", you aren't saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it.

The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of "genAI" which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR).

OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before "genAI" and will be true after.

Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn't mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of "genAI" in research.

I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Larry Sanger, who has spent decades concern-trolling Wikipedia to promote false balance in the name of "neutrality", has finally pissed off enough editors there that the community has booted his ass.

Background:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

[–] maol@awful.systems 7 points 11 hours ago

I have discovered from an unrelated Google search that there is a subreddit called r/TherapyGPT. We're in hell

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

New Odium Symposium episode: we look at Pulitzer prize winning columnist Charles Krauthammer and his pretentious and racist best-of collection, Things That Matter.

https://www.patreon.com/OdiumSymposium/posts/19-nightmare-161582344

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 12 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/

[–] TheLazyHase@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

My experience is that almost all these cases are effectively "ChatGPT are fixing my attention problems" (not necessarily full ADHD, just people feeling it's easier with an impulsion no matter how random) For me, it's worth paying attention too, but more in the sense "what does it reveal in people ?"

Edit : also, one of his example :

"find my typos.” It finds a lot of the errors that are normally not caught by a regular spell checker: doubled-up words, punctuation marks, or words that are actual words but are misspellings for other words.

2005 spell checkers find all of these reasonably well.

(and, in fact, the only two reasonable examples he give is the innocence project - but it's an attention span thing - and the full text indexing one which is the exact use case LLMs were developped for and is inherently non generative)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Do we have to believe gamblers who say they've got a "system"?

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 12 hours ago

only 8% of the time

[–] istewart@awful.systems 3 points 12 hours ago

Yah and sign up for their newsletter too

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago

I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you're essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren't going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they're right on the margins somehow, and that "somehow" is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it's embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn't also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they're used.

[–] anise@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

I just today stumbled upon maia arson crimew's writeup on a tiktok account named basedgang and their connection to remilia. and I just… what? What the fuck is remilia. I thought they were a weird nft company for dimes square losers. anyway this post has most likely been posted to a sneerclub before but I wanted to post it anyway because what the fuck

[–] maol@awful.systems 5 points 11 hours ago

I curse the day I found out what remilia was.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 12 hours ago

AHH THE FUCKIN MILADY CREW

fuck

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

ponzi scheme capitalists: and we're going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore

me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody

ponzi scheme capitalists: we're also going to hoard all SSDs

me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books

ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours

me: ｮﾟДﾟ)o

https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 6 points 13 hours ago

Nothing drives away the "are we the baddies?" thoughts like the warmth coming off a book pyre.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

“The assumption is: you have to physically own the books and destroy them after ‘reading’ them – in order to argue that no unauthorized copy remains in circulation and that it qualifies as fair use,” the bookseller says of the presumed logic behind it.

Have any actual courts ruled in favor of this nonsense? Because I thought fair use was tied to things like public benefit and transformation more than a direct number of copies. Like, I'm pretty sure that I'm not allowed to fax a book to myself even if I put the original through a shredder, and that's ignoring the question of how much gets inexorably lost in the process.

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

Alsup put this as a point in Anthropic's favour in the recent authorial class action, so now it's received wisdom.

[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot.

City officials are encouraging residents to interact with Dubbot—ask questions, take selfies, and experience firsthand how AI is shaping public safety. The goal is to foster transparency and gather feedback to refine the robot’s role in the community.

How it’s going

The person-sized, camera-covered robot that looked like it rolled right out of a sci-fi movie did not identify any criminal incidents, issue any tickets or help with any arrests in its nearly 10 months on the job.

On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I never understand how these things aren't simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes there's cameras and GPS locators etc. but there's ways around that, it's not that hard...

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

I wouldn’t want to do that myself… personally too much tracking gear in there, and it’s easy to make a mistake and not disable it all. Also, you just know that if you get caught, they’ll try and prosecute it like you kidnapped and dismembered a regular officer.

Now, I’m more surprised that they don’t get black bagged and tipped over. Maybe they only ever use them in super thoroughly surveilled areas with nearby human backup, but you’d expect at least one successful tipping to make the news somewhere.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Or somebody talking the bot into driving of stairs/into a river. If it ever freezes enough getting it on ice will also be fun.

10 year olds will have so much fun with these things.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

New findings in Bayesian tragedy

The inspection is being led by the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Angelo Vittorio Cavallo. According to Italian news outlets, the technical and investigative team is evaluating whether the crew underestimated the rapidly worsening weather conditions and whether the measures taken to weather the storm were adequate.

The Bayesian went down in the early hours of 19 August 2024 near Porticello, close to Palermo, while at anchor. The tragedy claimed seven lives, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, ship’s cook Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda.

The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, along with crew members Tim Eaton and Matthew Griffith, are under investigation.

time to update our priors

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 3 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Wasn't this the boat that everyone was like "yeah it's gonna fall over in a stiff wind which is pretty bad for a sailboat" only to be overruled because money? And now the captain and crew who were actually willing to sign on are being investigated.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 6 points 22 hours ago

shame about the cook

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you switch to a new kind of tainted beef, that's updating your prions

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

If you place your head in the beam line, that's updating your pions

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

The traditional way to exchange brain worms has been replaced by LW forum tho

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago

https://www.fastcompany.com/91562297/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-them-the-ick h/t naked capitalism

Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z.

More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively.

? the kids are alright ?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Polymarket was caught faking winnings via influencers Wonder if they paid any of our 'friends', or if they promoted it all for free.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Given how our very good friends were promoting the concept of prediction markets for ideological/idiot-logical reasons before polymarket existed I'm pretty sure they didn't need to be bribed or set up. Just let them show off that someone actually made the real thing they were pitching as a concept a decade ago and pretend all the issues don't exist.

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

Scott Alexander funded a prediction-market startup which uses points not dollars. I think many of our friends lack the ovaries to bet significant numbers of real dollars on Kalshi or Polymarket.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Today (actually sourced to Perun's video from a few weeks back but I watched it today) in Everything is Connected:

One of the advancements in one-way attack drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the move to directly-connected fiber optic cables for control. This has proven an effective way to counter electronic warfare, but has also meant that both sides have started using a volume of fiber optic cable that boggles the mind. This made the single fiber optic manufacturer in Russia a substantial strategic target, which Ukraine obligingly took advantage of. In turn, this has forced Russia to rely completely on imports, placing the Russian war effort in direct competition with China's AI datacenter buildout for this now-vital resource.

China being a proudly socialist country, this allowed the fiber optic manufacturers to raise their prices through the roof and absolutely take the Russians (and presumably their AI customers) to the cleaners.

Never let it be said that there are no AI-tangential stories that you can't feel at least a little bit good about, even if it is just the endless grift nexus capturing an even bigger bastard.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

The staggering amount of resources being poured into warehouses of machines that run code that create plausible text is mindblowing. A lot of stuff is ongoing cost too.

For something which — as far as I've seen — can halfarse busywork nobody cares about, steal code from github/approximate yaasnippet if you don't mind having to review code made with ducttape and a dream, or sort of act like a DM with alzheimers for very lonely people.

What are we even doing here? Even if governments think "Oh well we better trial it a bit because maybe it'll be useful" why would you expend so much human life on a slim possibility.

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

I'll yes-and you, Ukraine faces higher costs also, ie https://dronexl.co/2026/05/11/ukraine-fiber-optic-spool-price-ai-data-center-demand/

now serving with Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, said in a May 10 post on X that his unit used to buy 50-kilometer fiber optic spools for $300. Today, he said, “it’s easily $2,500.”

China makes money on both sides, plus the data centers you mentioned. Compare/contrast with Iran, who switched from GPS to Chinese nav to also get around jamming because leashes don't get that long... and China also makes money.

But locally, my BIL who runs fiber for a rural ISP, says basically they still make way more on recycling the copper wire they pull out than they pay for fiber. IDK.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

yeah china just makes things, i doubt that iranian military ever had a shot at getting american gnss receivers. any of modern civilian ones allows for use of signals from all 4 constellations anyway, and the jamming resistance comes from either using encrypted signals or by using more sophisticated receivers that have tiny phased array and can cut out a zone where jammer is (to some degree)

[–] maol@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

AI shite creeping into everyday life, example #1928748392:

I was out mattress shopping today. It was enjoyably ridiculous - the sales assistant measured my "pillow size" using a big contraption (apparently I'm a 2). However while testing a mattress I saw a video display advertising an "AI" widget to go with a specific "motion" mattress.

Baffled, I searched this up later.

AI voice control & Anti-snore box

Create your own spa-like oasis from the comfort of your own home by combining this Anti-snore Voice Control Box with our U210 and N700 motion bases. This range combines the very best and innovative technology with unbeatable comfort to give you the ultimate relaxation experience. Whether you want the optimal sleeping position or to spend your evenings unwinding with a good book, set offers luxurious comfort at the tip of your fingers.

I think this is un-enjoyably ridiculous. It's not really clear what's "AI" about it.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Imagine sleeping by lying down and closing your eyes peasant.

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

I guess the voice recognition probably used some kind of machine learning?

[–] maol@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

It seems possible, but they don't actually explain....