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 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.)
Isn’t that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing
(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)
Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?
e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines
i’m pretty sure that there’s an obscure stimulant that is some kind of giga-meth that lasts for 2d or more, that’d be more suitable for them
i looked up and it’s not one but at least two, but anticholinergics will keep them more grounded
I’m not sleeping on the job, I’m solving problems by lucid dreaming.
first read as lucid screaming
I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.
September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss
September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m
(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)
They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.
How do we make the experience of dating apps even worse? With AI, of course:
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps
The funniest bit is the guy who needed multiple exchanges with the ocean-boiling slop machine to come up with “Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you”.
“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”
According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).
“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”
She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.
An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed
(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he’s a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)
Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.
Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)
As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”
[…]
Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.
If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.
Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a “boomer” thought in the stock market)
E: I had hoped this part was a bit and he would reflect more on it later.
I am not here to belittle AI, it’s the future, and I recognize that we’re just scratching the surface in terms of what it can do.
But turns out it wasn’t. What if this is it? (And im talking about AI as it exists now not some magical other tech from the future), the gpt 5 release was meh, we reached the end of the S-curve (or hit our (local) maximum, if non-S curve curves are more your thing). He even admits the tech doesn’t work that well in his own article.
Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565
Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.
So for my gaming needs I check reddit every now and then, and on phone it had after the comments ended a related answers section, which gave related answers 99% of them in the same sub.
Now they out some ai generated shit between that and the answers are just horrible generic slop.
Check out this answer for example: https://www.reddit.com/answers/3c67990a-d1a2-4f86-b1e4-c2f3bb54803d/
Very important context here. I was looking at the starsector subreddit. (A 2d arcade like space shooter) This is about a minecraft like building game. (Most of the advice is also useless (how to survive: ‘use mods!’).
as one of the two non-computer scientists here, every time I check in there seems to be some load bearing open source project I’ve never heard of that’s gone fash. “GreenBlox is refusing to kick out a contributor who said the jewish question should be on the table??” “PipeLinux official account is posting that pronouns don’t exist?” open source people, are you ok?
CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It’s impossible to reason with them.
it seems to me that bigger problem is that they also think that software can solve these problems
open source people, are you ok?
No.
Think this about narrows it down. I was thinking about a longer post on all the bad dynamics and other weird things cs people and esp open source people have to deal with but you did it better.
For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).
The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.
Not that I want to minimise the problems that open source and tech in general very definitely have, but in this specific case it is a small number of people who are very loud and/or very rich, and sometimes both.
Hello other non-cs person!
“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky
I am going outside to smoke something. I don’t care what, just… something
“The Antichrist wants to stop all science”, says the motherfucker who pays people to drop out of universities.
Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it’s reverse apotheosis
Tired: breaking up face to face, like a normal person
Wired: breaking up via text
Inspired: breaking up via the mirror-universe version of a fundamentalist revival sermon
Give it a year or so and they’ll both pretend that this never happened.
Come on, give Greta a chance, she’s deserved it.
Just revenge for Yud banning NRx from lw.
In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.
As opposed to the current administration that is destroying science by cutting the NSF’s funding. An administration that Peter Thiel supports. He might want to look into that.
You know, idealistic autistic young woman world leader doesn’t sound that bad.
Guy who looks exactly like the antichrist wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and moustache pointing at other people in the room and accusing them of being the antichrist.
Lemme hit that shit too.
That makes ol pete sound crazier than anyone he referenced
Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?
https://bsky.app/profile/carrion.bsky.social/post/3m2kf3rottc2h
alt text
A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading
Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called “Al Slop Posters” that may violate our Community Guidelines. We’ve temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.
- Harmful language such as insults or slurs
- Unverified claims
- Appears intended to shame or abuse users
There are ‘user uses AI/has AI profile’ lists to they really are objecting to the word ‘slop’.
‘slop is a slur’ discourse incoming in T minus -100.
Oh my god, The Guardian with the sneer:
Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.
I’ve always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse
He’s Evil Dale Cooper, but drained of all charisma.
I just wanted to lob a sneer at this article fawning over Sora 2: https://spyglass.org/soras-slop-hits-different/
And again, a lot of this stuff — slop or not — is funny. Really, truly funny. Sora is scaling comedy in a way that we’ve never seen.
did this motherfucker just try to say “scaling comedy”? If you ever wondered why techbros are so unfunny, here’s something to point at.
Scaling comedy, it is when you pick bigger and bigger objects for ‘your mom’ jokes.
Future Elephant Graveyard target?
A new psychology preprint argues that “contemporary AI is research misconduct”.
While I like it, I wish there were more people pushing back and it not just being people involved with van Rooij. Makes it to easy to dismiss the concerns as just her being a crank. (Which I don’t think she is obviously, just wish there were more people in academia pushing harder back).
Is there a general term for the type of experimental or vaporware tech whose main function is creating FUD and FOMO which slows down the adoption and development of more mature conventional solutions? In the case of public transit these are collectively known as gadgetbahns. Examples from other fields include SMRs, direct air carbon capture, various embrace-extend-extinguish schemes in the software world, extraterrestrial colonies and a host of consumer IoT gadgets.
if there isn’t, I’m calling it muskware, its conceptually close enough to vaporware.
hmm I’m not aware of one beyond general “obstructionism” but that probably is a thing that needs a word
If there isn’t a term, maybe you get to invent one! Just exploring the concept a bit here to try to generate leads, in case you wanted them.
To rephrase your concept, you have A) things that are collective attention thieves/time sinks for a particular field or industry, and B) this vaporware appears to have a good profit-to-opportunity cost ratio, but in reality, it does not.
You could focus on just A), with a direct naming of “collective attention thief”. You can substitute “collective” with “industry” and “attention thief” with “time sink”, etc. Or something like “kleptoware” or “sinkware”, “holetech”, etc.
Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like “bubbleware”, “bubble” indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.
Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe “pigeonware” after the pigeon drop scam, or “fawneyware” or “fiddleware” etc., there are many scams you could use.
I’d describe it as parasitic disruption. The scam analogies are on point and fine for rhetorical purposes, but they imply a degree of intentionality which is not necessary for some tech to be parasitic.
Say you invent a new type of electical power line that’s more durable and power efficient than the existing type. The materials are also ten times more expensive than for the same length of normal power line and the only factory making this type of power line can only make enough to fill the needs of a few small customers with special needs. Meanwhile local government in Eriador is planning the electrification of the Shire community when the well-meaning councilor Brandybuck mentions this new type of power line he read about in a magazine. Perhaps the council should wait and see how that develops before committing to building power lines that might be obsolete the moment they’re put up.
Neither you nor the councilor are deliberately using your invention as a tool to stall electrification of the Shire, but the same effect happens anyway.
You point about property B is a pretty good one. My hunch is that tech follies like these are related to economic bubbles and share similarities with them. I’ll postulate that most parasitic disruptions go hand in hand with economic bubbles, but not necessarily all of them.
Another, a little more snide name I came up with while writing that: “free drinks tomorrow” tech, after a popular sign seen on the walls of bars around the world.
Parasitic Disruption is a great name for the overall structure. I think another way of framing it in economic terms would be to talk about the opportunity cost of innovation. Even if we take hucksters and monorail salesmen out of the picture (which is exceptionally generous steelmanning imo) we’re looking at the fact that the “disruptive” option has a whole lot of unknowns on the cost side of the sheet in terms of timeline, monetary costs, downsides and tradeoffs, etc. The upsides are also unknown, but are usually assumed to be “perfectly solves the problem”. On the other hand, the boring, well-understood option is going to have very specific answers to those questions. That skews the discussion strongly against actually doing anything, and creates a lot of room for the aforementioned grifters to work.
I think this framing also gives us some tools to fight back. You can easily turn those unknowns into horror stories of boondoggles past, and focus on the major advantage of being able to start today. The opposite of state-of-the-art is rarely “unusably antiquated” and the cost of leaving the problem - be it energy independence, mass rapid transit, or whatever - unsolved and festering is something we can push.
Fair! Since you’re coming in with lotr references, maybe pumpkinware. Named after the pumpkin in one of the endings of PJ’s RotK where the hobbits are in a pub and everyone else is impressed with the large pumpkin, oblivious to what the present could have been.
Also, in order to grow a large pumpkin, you probably gotta ignore/prune all other pumpkins and just feed the one growing. So there’s that too.
I think pumpkinware is catchy but that a more saleable story for the term is cinderella’s stagecoach turning out to be a pumpkin
Ye it’s called a “grift”
I mean sure, all gatgetbahns are grifts, but not all grifts are gadgetbahns you know
A quick OT post, to lighten the mood: https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/115344203384433517
Bluesky’s found another set of rakes to step on - after a user complained of ableism from the mods, Trust and Safety head Aaron Rodericks used the automated systems as an accountability sink, then let slip that users’ work was being uploaded to AI slop service thehive.ai, seemingly contradicting Bluesky’s promise to not dump artists’ work into the slop machine.
All those comments replying to how they use hive are missing the explicit corpo speak going on.
Bluesky said they wouldn’t use images uploaded to train AI. And Bluesky isn’t. They never said shit about partners or third party systems they use. And of course it’s in a post, not any sort of official terms or the like.
a lobsters is mad that a middling Perl project gets upvotes just because it’s “braincoded”
https://lobste.rs/s/bu1a84/i_brain_coded_static_image_gallery_few#c_um9usd
Apparently the red site couldn’t handle this one. Tags were changed from the descriptive perl to “vibecoding” and “satire”!
