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 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.
(2026 is off to a great start, isn’t it? Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.
got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don’t have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?
dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in
analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system
OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.
I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.
I adopted him from the shelter. He’d spent months if not close to a year there and no one wanted him. If I hadn’t adopted him, he would have been put down the next day. That was close to eight years ago. He was antisocial to other people but loved me.
Despite his discomfort, he still came and curled up on my chest in bed for a while last night. I appreciated that.
my condolences; we’ve gone through similar with our previous cats, all rescuees, and even when you know it’s the right decision, the pain is still there.
thanks to you he had 8 more years of life and a much happier existence than any he’d known before he met you. I think that’s remarkable.
Fuck, sorry :( internet hugs available if desired
💔
Sorry man, at least his suffering is through
also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus
Sorry for you and your cat.
I’m so sorry to hear that.
Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
David Futurelle of We Hunted the Mammoth fame has started a new project, Brotopians:
Futrelle was an AI guy for a bit, weirdly.
ah fuck, man. reddit.com/r/therapyGPT if you want to ruin your day
I’m doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability
I’ve started seeing people make paperwork with explicit carve-outs for prompt use (merely referred to as “AI” with no explicit definition, so …. gonna be fun when the lawsuits start)
My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It’s absolutely nuts.
Genuinely don’t understand how dependent these people are on AI. “I’ll generate an image of a skeleton at a bus stop” one of them said (it was relevant). I’ll go to Google images, I said. It’s faster! And you don’t end up with a mangled version of the Dublin Bus logo!
in the fall of 2024, i was getting teams messages from my students that were clearly llm-generated
The purpose of this block of code is to efficiently BLAH FUCKING BLAH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT
i have to assume it’s only gotten worse
I can’t comment on this better than bergstrom did, so link
Should have noted Hunter Ash admitted to being a pedophile.
Keeper should sell their customer lists to other dating services so those services can keep those weirdos out.
SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed “The time has come to declare war on AI”, and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.
I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi’s website*:
*yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.
Lately, I’ve become more and more concerned that “systemd free” is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier
I’ve always thought of linux as a vaguely commie thing but it seems like a) there were more libertarians in there than I thought, b) using linux appeals to some very right wing freaks who don’t like the idea of not being in total control, and c) there’s a right wing computer culture promoted by online influencers to nerdy young men, not dissimilar to right wing gamer culture.
The above site is hosted on neocities. I’ve been involved in the small web/personal web/indie web for a while (almost 6 years now, Jesus) and I knew there’s a more right wing side to it but I hadn’t come across it much (except for digdeeper linked to above, whose online privacy guides I read and took seriously before he started posting about Covid and I realized he was a conspiracy theorist). Then recently I found a neonazi’s site on neocities through a Christian webring* and spent a while looking around in morbid fascination.
*You can’t join if you support abortion or gay people, but apparently they don’t check to make sure you’re not a Nazi. I’m tempted to set up a competing webring for Christians with normal views…
burzum and luke smith, that tracks as well
Also being weird about systemd (not saying that’s an automatic nazi thing, I am myself a bit weird about it as well, but y’know…)
Yet another Palantir co-founder goes mask-off complaining about “commies or Islamists”.
Remember it’s only tyranny when the government does it. Otherwise it’s just sparkling feudalism.
Actually having made that joke I feel obliged to link a post from historian Brett Devereaux about, among many other things, what the ancient greeks meant by a tyrant because “building personal power by subverting and corrupting the actual state” was even more key than power being invested in one individual.
The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what seperates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule.
This distinction feels meaningful in the year of our lord 2026 for some reason.
new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632
this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a “gender centrist” psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one
on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there’s basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼
slaps roof of episode This bad breast can fit so many bad penises in it.
You might consider pitching Cursed Media if that’s not who you already pitched-- I’ve been wishing for a while they had some EA/rationalist experts around who could do a series.
that is who we reached out to. i think rat material would fit extremely well with what they’ve got going on and represents a significant gap in their current coverage
The number of times I’ve been listening to QAA and thought “dang, these guys are missing a lot of relevant context” when talking particularly about the current crop of tech oligarchs is high enough that I have at times had to hit pause and step away for a while.
unfortunately i don’t think there’s any way to communicate how significant the gap is without coming off as condescending or churlish. but like qaa is probably my favorite podcast and i too am tormented by this
Scott Alexander: “I wish the neoreactionaries dropped the monarchy shit”
Monkey paw curls (content warnings: antisemitism, Yarvin).
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My lack of a Bluesky account spares me again. Thankfully, I have Skyview.social to ensure my eyes are scarred anyway (seriously, do we have to fight another world war over if Nazis are bad or not, it shouldn’t take the blood of tens of millions to make that clear)
Also found a nice summary of our current moment in the replies:
(alt: “I am old enough to remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad”)
cue this lobste.rs shitshow where someone states “88 is a known Nazi dogwhistle”, and multiple people come out of the woodwork saying even if it is, it’s not so bad actually, get over it
https://lobste.rs/s/rvgvgj/best_line_length_is_88
Submitted blog post could without loss of generality be titled “Black’s default of 88 for line length is not necessarily the best”, yet author decided to go with the title they have now… edit author seems to be a good egg generally https://mastodon.social/@glyph
Something useful to know, which I’m not saying over there because it’d be pearls before swine, is that Glyph Lefkowitz and many other folks core to the Twisted ecosystem are extremely Jewish and well-aware of Nazi symbols. Knowing Glyph personally, I’d guess that he wanted to hang a lampshade on this particular symbol; he loves to parody overly-serious folks and he spends most of his blogposts gently provoking the Python community into caring about software and people. This is the same guy who started a PyCon keynote with, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Python, not to praise it.”
Glyph has weighed in here
Apparently someone edited in the numeral in the title when submitting to lobste.rs. Another entry on the watchlist.
Sorry forgot to check, despite a friend of mine doing the same to me with tumblr and I’m also annoyed then.
Not sure i had it in me to alt text all that yarvin however
“They might as well be Latvians” is a straight out of Arrested Development.
OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.
that sucks hard, I’m sorry. mine recently too, went from “looking a bit off” to “have to put 'em down” in less than a month. still hits me like a truck
hope it goes as well as possible for y’all
That absolutely blows, friend. Hang in there and we’ll see you around.
Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.
My condolences, that truly sucks :(
i’m so sorry. (tentative hug of support, if acceptable.)
Thinking of yall
🫂
That’s awful. I’m sorry.
🫂
i am so sorry
That is shit, also sending good vibes. It never is just one thing isnt it. Bad luck always seems to come in multiples.
Man, that’s rough. I know it’s not much but I’m sending you positive energy from where I am.
Fuck bro that sucks
Against my better judgement I got into an argument with a promptfan on Bluesky. To his credit, aside from the usual boring arguments (“models are getting better, and better”, “have you tried model xyz”, “everyone not using chatbots will be left in the dust” he provided an actual example.
https://github.com/dfed/SafeDI/issues/183 It’s a bug that’s supposedly easy to test, but hard to reason about. Took the chatbot half an hour while it would take him several (allegedly).
Now, my first thought was: “If a clanker could do it (something that famously can’t reason) then it couldn’t be that hard to reason about.”
But I was curious so I looked. Unfortunately it is an area I’m not familiar with and in a language (Swift) I don’t know at all.
Probably should file the claim under “not true or false” and touch grass or something, but it’s bugging me.
Any one y’all who could say if there’s something interesting in there?
Complementing sibling comments: Swift requires an enormous amount of syntactic ceremony in order to get things done and it lacks a powerful standard library to abbreviate common tasks. The generative tooling does so well here because Swift is designed for an IDE which provides generative tools of the sort invented in the 80s and 90s; when their editor already generates most of their boilerplate, predicts their types, and tab-completes their very long method/class names, they are already on auto-pilot.
The actual underlying algorithm should be a topological sort with either Kahn’s algorithm or Tarjan’s algorithm. It should take fewer than twenty lines total when ceremony is kept to a minimum; here is the same algorithm for roughly the same purpose in my Monte-in-Monte compiler, sorting modules based on their dependencies in fifteen lines. Also, a good standard library should have a routine or module implementing topological sorting and other common graph algorithms; for example, Python’s
graphlib.TopologicalSorterwas added in 2020 and POSIXtsortdates back to 1979. I would expect students to immediately memorize this algorithm upon grokking it during third-year undergrad as part of a larger goal of grokking graph-traversal algorithms; the idea of both Kahn and Tarjan is merely to look for vertices with no incoming edges and error if none can be found, not an easy concept to forget or to fail to rediscover when needed. Congrats, the LLM can do your homework.If there’s any Swifties here: Hi! I love Taytay; I too was born in the late 80s and have trouble with my love life. Anyway, the nosology here is pretty easy; Swift’s standard library doesn’t include algorithms in general, only algorithms associated to data structures, which themselves are associated to standardized types. Since Swift descends from Smalltalk, its data structures include Collections, so a reasonable fix here would be to add a
Graphcollection and make topological sorting a method; see Python’s approach for an example. Another possibility is to abuse the builtin sort routine, but this will costO(n lg n)path lookups and is much more expensive; it’s not a long-term solution.Thanks! I’ll definitely check out Python graphlib sometime. That’s more in my wheelhouse.
Doesn’t look interesting to me. NB I’m not a Swifty. If you’re someone looking to make a compile-time dependency injection validation framework, cycle detection seems like an early feature to add, and feels like a pretty early unit test to implement.
E: read response from BurgersMcSlopshot please :)
DI frameworks are tricky beasts. Either they sacrifice flexibility for simplicity (I’ve seen this done in Go and in Scala, where the DI essentially generates basic instantiation and more advanced resolution is left to the app developer) or they can get really complex but do some handy things (.Net 4.x DI frameworks like Castle Windsor provided some neat lifecycle management tools but was internally very complex).
Cycle detection gets a little hairer the more complex a dependency/ class of dependencies gets. The process itself doesn’t change but the internal representation of the graph needs to be sufficiently abstract enough to illustrate a cycle for all possible resolution scenarios.
Based on the commit to fix the particular bug, it looks like the change will address a specific scenario but will probably fail to address similar issues.
All this to say “the problem isn’t too hard to think about but the solution isn’t straight-forward”, also “this is a fine short- term fix but longer-term would involve redefining the internal representation of a dependency graph”, and finally " An LLM-provided solution is at best a band-aid, in the most generous light.’
Thanks so much! Now I can waste my life on more interesting things…
I see. I guess I was thinking too abstractly about how a system like this might work.
Another ChatGPT fatality’s just hit the news - California teen Sam Nelson has died of a drug overdose, after two years of trusting the chatbot for drug advice.
