this post was submitted on 09 Nov 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 15th November 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 4 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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(I get the feeling we're close to this bubble's end.)

Anyways, 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 soo 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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[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Outlook was down for an entire day yesterday, which affected me since my school email uses it. I don't remember any Outlook outage this bad before, and from what I've heard, Microsoft was cosplaying as a headless chicken in their attempts to fix it. Maybe getting rid of 60,000 employees to embrace the magic of AI isn't working out so well.

Meanwhile I saw this AI panic post on Linkedin (warning: psychic damage). Apparently all the doomers are vindicated and all the critics are completely discredited because of ... you guessed it, math problems! You see, one mathematician was very sad in an interview! (Let's also ignore the many nuanced statements like this that mathematicians have made about their own field.)

But somehow he hasn't noticed AI affecting anything he actually understands. Well, you see, that's because in the real world, the magic of AI does need to wait a few years before the puny humans understand how to wield its power (but of course the doomsday is coming on schedule in a few years). The argument sounds nice until you look at of software, where there should be no physical obstacles for adopting AI. Now, coding has been solved by AI on the planet of Earth Prime where he lives, where OpenAI and Anthropic have long monopolized every software market with products of much higher quality and reliability than what came before. Unfortunately, I live on Earth, where I have seen two major vibe-coding failures in the last two days (the Outlook outage and the Humble Store rewrite).

[–] mii@awful.systems 7 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

Won'tcha look at that. Now that MAGA isn't hot shit anymore, Alex Karp goes full "How do you do, fellow Democrats" and says Palantir has basically always been a progressive company.

https://www.businessinsider.com/alex-karp-palantir-democrat-progressive-midterms-2026-11

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 7 points 6 hours ago

Alex Karp will say anything that will let him take coke and murder people.

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 7 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7xJeaAKTKxbHL6F9a/a-new-kind-of-prediction-market-for-science

Got a problem of randos shitting AI-generated ARXIV preprints into existence faster than the scientific community can deal with it? SHOEHORN IN PREDICTION MARKETS!

(Incidentally, my boss has been complaining about the onslaught of low quality preprints that are shat out with the usual low-quality signifiers that let you filter things being harder to immediately see, and his conclusion is that he is sad to say science is going back towards and has to go back towards systems of reputation and patronage where you have to look at who lent their reputation to a work and who newcomers are being vouched for by to determine if it is worth looking at it at all.)

(And I am again reminded of our electronic information sphere becoming like the Earth's genetic information sphere in that it is full of selfish parasites looking to hijack you to use their nonproductive information, with productive cellular life jealously guarding its genomic nucleic acids and not letting it interact with the froth of selfish viral and mobile elements bouncing off it at all times.)

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 5 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KrFu7kGk3x8aZcCzu/there-is-no-such-thing-as-cosmophagous-ai

They are SO CLOSE to getting it. People get so crippled thinking of the possibilities of life and intelligence in the universe when they assume that the only possibilities are endless exponential expansion and destruction. and I abhor the discussion of abiogenesis in the comments SO MUCH.

The probability of life spontaneously forming is related as inverse exponential to the complexity of the chemical reactions required to spontaneously generate that life. The simplest living organism we know of has a HEAVILY compressed DNA sequence of about 50,000 base pairs, all of which are most likely load-bearing. Back of the envelope, this means the spontaneous generation of this organism is less likely than 1 in 4^50,000, or about 1 in 1e30000, to say nothing of the machinery required for actually transcribing the DNA and synthesizing proteins

This is PRECISELY analogous to being freaked out that a hillside where it rains can develop a river channel when you would need to move all the sediment in a branching network of ditches all at once for it to still transport water.

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 5 points 10 hours ago (3 children)

Back of the envelope, this means the spontaneous generation of this organism is less likely than 1 in 4^50,000, or about 1 in 1e30000, to say nothing of the machinery required for actually transcribing the DNA and synthesizing proteins

Are the Wrongers using their Powers of Rationality to literally rediscover creationist talking points?

I remember during my first year of undergrad, I saw some dumbass creationist with a big poster in the middle of a courtyard. I was so dumbfounded that I decided to take a picture of the poster (I didn't grow up around creationist types so I found it shocking). One of the talking points on that poster was that the probability that 18000 base pairs randomly happen to be correct is around 10^-10000. Quite funny that this Wronger offers even worse odds.

[–] TrashGoblin@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

Are the Wrongers using their Powers of Rationality to literally rediscover creationist talking points?

Given the "load-bearing" in the quote, it's entirely possible it's simply regurgitating creationist talking points in a different context, because it's written by a slop-bot.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago

Yeah it is interesting how much the LW space recreates these sorts of ideas from first principles, the combination of overfocus on math, disdain for non-lw experts, disdain for softer sciences, insider hero worship, and contrarianism creates a perfect cult incubator.

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

That's the simplest way that this is wrong. But it's also wrong in a much more interesting way that even a bunch of scientists I interact with don't quite get sometimes.

You can talk about the current complex system that has built up a bunch of internal dependencies over time, and wrongly talk about the odds of the specific sequence with all that embedded history appearing all at once.

But you can also talk about canalization, and the metaphors from erosion are very apt and very intentional. If you have a hillside where it rains, there are a huge number of drainage networks that can transfer water down the hill, and any one of them is only a tiny subset of the huge of possibilities. But also, if you take a hillside and bulldoze it, you WILL get one of those valid networks back again, and it does not have to happen all at once. Instead, small changes to the inert starting point will be driven into existence by the pressures of the flowing water, causing the flow to slightly increase. Those highly contingent starting points will then drive an accelerating process of secondary changes that pushes the hillside towards an efficient drainage network, regardless of the starting point. The system is driven very predictably into a tiny corner of parameter space, from a huge number of initial starting points.

There are very persuasive arguments that abiogenesis and evolution are very similar. That instead of talking about the random convergence of rare events, you should think of the process as a runaway, tiny initial changes making future ones more likely in a chain reaction that drives you towards function. Initially inert chemistry subject to disequilibrium being driven into becoming an efficient metabolic channel, and an efficient information channel, pushing you towards the living state in an initial environment that has enough disequlibrium and chemistry that can support structure. In this school of thought, the forces that drive life into existence are basically the same forces that sustain it once it exists.

EDIT This is even relevant to machine learning! You literally initialize synthetic neural network with random numbers, and apply the training process, trying to push it towards having the output given an input match the ground truth. Regardless of the random inert starting point, you reliably drive the network into a state that produces something like the ground truth output from the training input, provided there is sufficient information in the input in the first place. You don't have to initialize it with the perfect starting weights, almost every starting point is canalized towards some state that produces the relevant type of outputs.

I recommend looking for the work of one particular guy, Dr. Eric Smith. There's an old talk of his somewhere on youtube, where to roughly paraphrase, he says that you shouldn't be wondering about the very specific chemical events at the origin of life, but instead, you should "ask what was so wrong with the dead Earth that it had to spontaneously break down into the living Earth" which is the stable state, the resting point that it is canalized towards.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

canalized is now my word of the day, very evocative!

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

Apparently there are rumours going around that Dario had a hand in Jensen’s ousting. I’d suppose its because he’s one of those ‘we can’t loose to China’ folks. But also wouldn’t that be a seriously stupid move with the IPO around the corner? Then again, Anthropic are not exactly the smartest bunch (and these are just rumours)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

Very "sawing off the branch you're perched upon" behavior, wouldn't put it past them

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

Could also be RADICAL AI SAFETYISTS

[–] BioMan@awful.systems 4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

What would the play there be? Working against someone who makes money from people buying hardware to locally run open source models?

[–] lurker@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

My best guess is that it would be something about ‘stopping China from making AGI’

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 13 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Oh look, bicameral mind is in the spotlight again.

I posit that farts were odorless until some time after the invention of writing. This is not a hypothesis. You can't falsify it. Therefore it's true. White people invented smelling farts.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Is this like the time when people who had never been at sea in the late afternoon decided that ancient greeks couldn't tell red from blue?

In Homer's Iliad, we rarely encounter the Greek word for 'I'

Greek in general tends to omit the first person pronoun since the corresponding conjugation is both pretty distinct and also rimes with said pronoun, so why say 'I am' when 'am' do trick is usually how it goes.

Now I'm not saying their entire methodology was open iliad.pdf, ctrl+f ἐγώ and be surprised at the result count, but if they landed on the authors of the Iliad being p-zombies for their conclusion, disregarding such an assumption might be premature.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago

The ego!

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Let me introduce another related concept: olfactory zombies. Imagine if there are people who can't actually smell farts. These O-zombies physiologically have the nerves to detect the volatile chemicals responsible for fart smell, but they don't actually feel the experience of smelling a fart. They may react to farts in the same way as non-O-zombies who smell a fart, but it's a non-conscious programmed response and they are not aware of how it feels to actually smell a fart.

There's no reason not to assume O-zombies are real. There's also no reason not to assume there's a good reason to care even if they were.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You better believe that I'm appropriating this for the next time some dweeb comes at me with p-zombies

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 21 hours ago

I formally dedicate this to public domain wherever possible, CC0 where not possible and heartily discourage attribution and royalties.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Showing sloperators that using an LLM makes their brain power shrink over time has had little effect; they all think that they are big brain bois with extra capacity to spare.

What if they heard that LLM usage shrinks their penis by a micron every so many million tokens?

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

Think that would just drive them to incel style rhetoric. With a helping of 'no you are right to worry, but it doesn't look like your penis has shrunk sir' from the bots. (poor third world workers who then have to process that shit. "why are all these people suddenly uploading their penis in grok?").

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

they'd just start buying overpriced leather jackets to compensate. there's a worked example in the press right now

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Leather blocks the Chat-5GPT rays

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

Jet fuel can't melt leather

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

It’s true: sloperators have vast amounts of grey matter sitting neglected

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I don't really want to just put someone's /u/ on blast, but I've found an account on Lemmy that appears to be posting nothing but anti-AI posts with LLM titles and top level comments. What a world.

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

do it, alert mods and or admins of respective communities, it's not the first time it happens and one at least was banned before

[–] it_wasnt_arson@awful.systems 2 points 19 hours ago

Apparently checks out. Guess it's just a block from me.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 3 points 1 day ago

Kinds funny to make propaganda against llms and bill the llm companies for it tho

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

The second affair has hit Nvidia stock

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I want this to matter but stock market stuff is all fake anyway.

People say something like "1.2 trillion wiped out" but stocks aren't actually tied to anything anywhere near their actual value (dividends) and it's only ever a tiny volume being traded anyway. Most stock trading is indistinguishable from meme coins.

NVIDIA has enough control over actually valuable technology that they don't particularly need to be able to raise additional funding to continue turning the world's chips into stacked boxes in a Taiwanese warehouse.

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

I mean if it keeps going down its going to be pretty bad news for Anthropic’s IPO

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think anthropic's business model is bad news for their IPO. Nvida stocks be damned the filing is fucking hilarious.

[–] lurker@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

putting ‘we dont know if we’ll ever be profitable’ in the IPO filing was definitely a brave move, I’ll give them that

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Sorry I have to vent, but looks like the humblebundle site did an AI powered redesign as the site (while looking like it works) is now a total mess. I'm a bit in slow motion trainwreck watching mode. Sucks I do have a list of unclaimed keys still at the site which I paid for (some of which are now gone, as in I know I still had a key as I kept a list of some of the keys in a file (I was worried something like this happening for a while) but the keys are no longer in the list of games I got, this is just one of the many many bugs or just plain weird things I noticed (The reddit is filled with people having a lot more complaints, somebody bought a '4 for 1, play with your friends' pack, and only got one key, if you made a 'gift a key link' yday the link now is dead, but the game counts as claimed, etc etc).

The UI does have nice rounded corners now however.

E: additional funny moment, so I know people who have subscribed to humble choice (a monthly thing) an basically have forgotten about it, but during the creation of the new site they messed something up and they no longer have the information on file to complete the transaction for that, so a lot of subscriptions will likely auto cancel, what a foot shot).

E2: It also removed 2FA, made it possible to change passwords without the old password, and switch emails without access to the old email. Amazing work.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I have also been amazed. Like there is so much wrong. (love the 2022 and earlier games on the 'new releases' page for example).

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[–] samvines@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago (1 children)

God bless linkedin lunatics

Transcription of the image below

People often forget that Jensen is the hero who brought the light of modern AI to every household. He is also one of the most technical and charismatic CEOs in tech. He single handedly contributed more to the US and global economy than 80% of all other tech execs combined. Jensen is the heart and mind of Nvidia and one small mistake on the personal level only shows that he is human. Do not judge. ♥️ Jensen ♥️

Yes just a small personal mistake like blowing up your marriage and committing treason 😂😂😂

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

Treason is cool and good. Cheaters can walk into a fire.

[–] sansruse@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

calling what jensen did 'treason' accepts far too much of both the AI boosters' and the corrupt imperialist US government's worldview, in my opinion

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

This is true, but given how so many other AI boosters have committed hard to being hawkish towards China to justify throwing more money into the AI money hole I think it's worth using the "treason" angle as a wedge issue. I don't personally think it's that big a deal apart from the rank hypocrisy of it, but it feels like a far stronger push against Nvidia and the bubble as a whole than focusing on Jensen's personal relationships.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

yeah 100% but like he could have rounded up all us politicians into one room and sold the GPS coordinates to China who then bombed it and it'd still be awesome.

You can't betray people that impose themselves on. Treason is fake bullshit

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