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.)
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Can I delete the Chrome’s OptGuideOnDeviceModel safely? It’s taking up 4GB
. . .
I also founds mentions of bunch of various flags you can potentially disable to turn the whole feature off, e.g. chrome://flags/#optimization-guide-on-device-model - but I’ve seen at least 5 other ones mentioned in several sources, with various people claiming for each that they don’t work . . .
Now Chrome can hog your VRAM too. Yay
Don’t worry if you only have 8GB and need the other half for anything, Chrome will probably relinquish it. This is very intelligent, as all the browser has to do is simply load another 4GB file from disk the next time you do anything.
Somehow, HPMoR could have been even worse.
I ruled no intelligence enhancement magic in HPMOR because otherwise it turns into Project Lawful.
Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of instant death potion (known to muggles as cyanide) and force fed it to Harry Potter. He was rewarded with accolades, wealth and fame and lived happily ever after.
Ron reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of potion that makes you talk like a conservative bullshit artist and said “Have you ever heard of Chesterton’s fence, Potter?” Harry, hearing a genetive case proper noun spoken as a part of two word noun phrase suddenly realized he was no longer talking to a strawman of a simpleton. “The burden of proof is in fact on you, the reformer, to first make a strong case for status quo to prove you understand why things are the way they are before you can even begin to challenge the state of things.” Harry was immediately convinced quidditch is good as is and voted Tory twice.
Harry takes a swig and immediately sees the truth: that he is the smartest specialest bestest boy in the universe. He spends the remaining 73 chapters celebrating and gloating about this fact while accomplishing nothing. So the story doesn’t meaningfully change at all.
Harry was immediately convinced quidditch is good as is
Fun fact: the Harry Potter fandom (when it still existed) turned Quidditch into an actual real-life sport back in 2003 (with the first game being played at HP fan-convention Nimbus 2003, fittingly enough).
The sport changed its name to Quadball in 2022, for Extremely Obvious Reasons.
So yes, there are people out there who thought it was good as is. (Mostly.)
Quadball is officially better than any sport that doesn’t let transgender people compete. There I said it.
Granted this is a particularly low bar nowadays.
@BlueMonday1984 @bitofhope fucking dweebs JFC
Heard it has a horrible injury rate, too
@o7___o7 I mean, good?
PR for AI slop generated DWARF support for ocaml. Expectation: doesn’t work
Reality: replicates existing support from another project including attribution to the author.
Wow highly recommend reading all his comments where he doubles down on how everyone else is in the wrong (for wanting maintainable code that isn’t a legal liability) while he is in the right (for being brave and bold enough to type prompts into an LLM to create code that he won’t stand behind).
It’s almost as if he went in there looking for a fight.
Lool, look at these two quotes next to eachother:
One caveat, though: even if I didn’t type the code myself, I own it — and it’s my responsibility now.
vs.
Beats me. AI decided to do so [write the copyright as someone else] and I didn’t question it.
Ah yes, the classic open source guy stance of “you get to praise me publicly but direct criticism or problems to [over there]”
The purpose of AI is theft, exhibit ∞
It’s not where I obtained this PR but how.
the inability to follow a through b through c here is….something
Paul Campos - The medium is the mob
Discusses the “reverse Flynn effect”, filter bubbles, and infopollution via GenAI
Whitehouse AI czar (rightfully) imo pointing out that it’s pretty shit behavior to shout fire in a movie theatre and instead of admitting fault just typing ¯_(ツ)_/¯ in chat
PERHAPS WE SHOULD HAVE TITLED OUR PREDICTION AI 2027 DIFFERENTLY???
The bailey: AI 2027 😱 The motte: ahem actually we had a footnote that said AI 2030, so we don’t need feel the need to retract/apologize/or slightly edit our fearmongering website.
Let this be an albatross around scoots neck forever lmaou.
Me in 2027 when the AI hasn’t turned me and the rest of ya’ll into corgis yet ;_;
(yes this actually happens in their most likely scenario forecast)
I think we all should be entitled to compensation for the mental anguish.
Mozilla continues to double down on AI, promising to “do for AI what we did for the web” in their latest (probably AI-extruded) blogpost.
In related news, I found a toot thread attributing the current shitfest (and AI’s popularity in general) to “a strong majority of even the actually well-intentioned, smart leaders in tech [getting] their brains fully cooked by these heuristics machines”. Where the OP is finding those “well-intentioned, smart leaders”, I do not know.
Hijaking the Mozilla mention to point to https://tabstack.ai/ again, the upcoming Mozilla-branded scraper API for AIs that promises to “stealthily” (their words) bypass captchas. Cos I don’t think enough people have heard of it still.
Checked back in on Framework’s rotting corpse.
The company’s retired their official Discord server (in the Blade Runner sense), about a month after the mod team jumped ship over the company’s fash turn. There’s discussion on the Framework forums about it, too.
Its not the only social media platform they’ve abandoned - they left Bluesky and Mastodon to court fascists on Twitter a while ago.
All the fash stuff is incredibly bad, but I cannot get over this:
I personally found a lot of enjoyment in the Framework discord. The format of a discord server is a lot more useful for chatting and discussion within a community than something like a forum (which seems a little more siloed).
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. EITHER YOU ARE INSANE OR I AM.
Do I even want to know what a Subnautica or a Krafton is?
Okay, quick TL;DR:
Subnautica is a video game made by Unknown Worlds - their first game released in 2018, and the sequel’s been delayed to 2026 after some major development shakeups in July 2025 (namely, Unknown World CEO Ted Gill and co-founders Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire getting fired)
Krafton, who acquired Unknown Worlds in 2021, are currently being sued by Gill, Cleveland and McGuire. The company stands accused of screwing the three out of $250 mil in bonuses that a release into Early Access would’ve helped them earn.
People also really enjoy Subnautica, it is quite a beloved game.
Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don’t seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance
Literally every trend he brings up to showcase this cultural stagnation is some combination of aesthetic, nonexistent, or driven by income inequality and a loss of economic security.
An aging population too. Young people commit more violence, use more substances, and get into more accidents. The Boomers still have massive influence on culture even though its not cool to market to them.
My understand that the decline of tobacco use, alcohol use, sex, and pregnancy among youth in the USA are well-established (but how many young US people are sharing naughty texts or photos when before the smartphone they would be making out?)
And isn’t the trans and nonbinary stuff a norm that teh yoofs are enthusiastically breaking while people over 50 fret?
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Super forecasters update timeline by 150% their og forecast.
Fucking dumbasses
It’s a logarithmic plot to begin with and they still feel the need to make the curve exponential lol.
I’m sure they have a rigorous and objective metric for what coding tasks take how long at what success rate for humans.
Dont worry guys, the alien spaceships from Niburu are taking a bit longer to arrive.
I snorted a bit of my drink
I look forward to the cultists continuing to update these graphs convinced they are seeing the future of the cosmos as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the fever dreams
Hey, I’ve revised my fanfiction, too.
…you know the first time you mentioned this I assumed it was just for the bit but now I’m both impressed and intimidated.
Step 1. Get a silly idea
-
Develop the silly idea as seriously as possible for love of the craft
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Continue because it’s cheaper than therapy
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Push yourself to finish because by Gad 2020 needed a counterweight
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Invent a new fantasy setting and rewrite whole chunks because Neil Gaiman went and smegshake ducked himself
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As long as line go up then everything is going ok ☺️/s
will these guys ever get to rainbow-chart levels of galaxy brain or will just be content to fudge some numbers on regular visuals?
This is reminiscent of memestock/buttcoin charts where a new asymptomatic curve is dropped onto the same rather flat graph over and over again.
Saw a video talking about Google officially releasing “nano banana pro” which i regret to inform you is a real product and that the video was not a shitpost.
“Nano banana pro” sounds like a relic of tiki fashion that manages to be racist in a way we have mostly forgotten.
Corey Quinn wrote a spite-driven-dev cli for it - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_im-humbled-to-announce-that-after-launching-activity-7397400805458395137-73Ua
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his “agentic cockpit”
I feel like “we’ll just build a world model” is on the same level as saying " we’ll just solve the P vs NP problem."
img text
How to draw an owl:
- draw some circles. (drawing of circles)
- draw the rest of the fucking owl. (very skillful and detailed drawing of an owl)
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second take from me. Here’s the full tweet:
one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
I’m going to read this as a joke because he didn’t end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that’s not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it’s still an achievement.
After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
How briefly do you have to attend college to still be this clueless about how citations work?
well it’ll become apparent during first attempts at writing a paper that requires them, but it can be a very long time if subject is dense enough
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means he’s serious, and partial periodization means that he’s typing with one hand.
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess “hj” will mean handjob forever.
It’s clearly meant to mean /HalleluJah
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
I expect her methodology was great but I don’t actually know what it was.
Science!
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aella’s addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a “Big Kink Survey” which was “trending on TikTok” and had “very good SEO”. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word “biofemales” again).
I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
But don’t worry she’s very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, I’m nevertheless very pro trans.
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
I think it’s unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
… Nevermind that her data doesn’t even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these “concerns” are all pulled out of thin air.
(I also lament that this makes things really rough for the trans men for whom this is not a fad, and for whom earlier transitioning would be a huge quality of life improvement.)
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that I’d stop if I didn’t like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course it’s not the “permanent changes to bodies” that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. “What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??” fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be “safe”.
“What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??”
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like “oh I’m fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??”
cursed thought
…is that yud for “she’s refused to fuck me”?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
Aella in the comments: I’m just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle’s isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn’t hear about it
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Woman good at science? Must have a man brain. Send tweet.
Oops forgot to be weird about jews lemme amend that white jews can also be smart even if they have girl brains.
Pepper
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She can’t tell the difference between “the people who wrote the paper” and “the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper”. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.
