Want to wade into the spooky 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    8 hours ago

    Ugh. Hank Green just posted a 1-hour interview with Nate Soares about That Book. I’m halfway through on 2x speed and so far zero skepticism of That Book’s ridiculous premises. I know it’s not his field but I still expected a bit more from Hank.

    A YouTube comment says it better than I could:

    Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.

    I can understand being concerned about the problems with the technology that exist now, but hyper-fixating on an unfalsifiable existential threat is stupid as it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      5 hours ago

      “I can read HTML but not CSS” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2021 (and since apparently scrubbed from the Internet, to live only in the sneers of fond memory)

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/

    It’s a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won’t copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:

    • Grokipedia’s article on Wikipedia uses the word “ideological” or “ideologically” 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it’s Wikipedia article).
    • Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” or “biological males”. The last paragraph of the article “The Wachowskis” is downright unhinged.
    • The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.

    Also certain articles have this at the bottom:

    The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    KDE showing how it should be done:

    https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

    Question:

    I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

    Response:

    We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

    1. The owner is a nazi
    2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
    3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
    4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

    Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

    We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    2 days ago

    back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.

    cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.

    Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.

    https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood

    A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text “finishing this fight”, “destroy the flood” and a link to “join ice gov”.

    alt text

    A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text “finishing this fight”, “destroy the flood” and a link to “join ice gov”.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        That’s depressing… I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but I’d be hard pressed to do that with any other game… I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but can’t remember much else about their sound design.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Yeah silence is being complicit in this case.

      Trump also posted an image of him in the masterchief suit. Without a helmet. Halo is not my thing but I think that is a thing which is not done, like with judge dredd, the helmet stays on.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      NB: a few cocktails in. Don’t really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.

      Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so it’s pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. It’s initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Bungie made Marathon before Halo and it’s basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many “integrated” species. It’s a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.

        OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pfor’s leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and there’s an eldrich horror living in a star too.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:

    “We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob

    https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979

    It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT

    It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      two overlapping cookie opt-out popups:

      Love when this happens and on your phone you cant even reach the buttons. The lost art of testing your websites.

      • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        The lost art of testing your websites.

        i run with javascript disabled by default, and it’s actually refreshing when a website at least displays “this shit requires javascript lol” instead of just not working

        the modern web sucks, let’s all train ravens like asoiaf

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      but never a sex bot

      Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says “we” he only means the present cohort of microsofties.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    https://www.1x.tech/neo

    Oh look, my delivery from the Nightmare Factory arrived!

    Seriously tho, thats not a “tendon,” that’s a nylon rope on a pulley, and thats not a robot, thats some kind of skinny feller in knitted gimp suit. This is just insulting.

    Also, imagine the factorial number of germs it would absorb from scrubbing the toilet. You’d need to invent some kind of new branch of farticle physics to describe the bacterial load that thing would develop. Do you suppose that it takes off its own skin to wash ala Hooty from The Owl House?

    Edit: orange site loves it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736457

    Wsj reviewed it, looks nothing like the ad imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      That WSJ review is something special and I didn’t have sound on or CC so I’m sure there’s some weapons-grade stupid going on in dialog that I am missing. I stopped watching about when they put up a picture of Allen Turing (AI Pioneer!) and a picture of the “AI Pilot” who’s first name is Turing and then highlighted that both have the word “Turing” in their names.

      Also that overgrown Roomba with hip dysplasia took 5 minutes to put two glasses in a dishwasher poorly.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.

        (Anyone else noticed that in the promo vids?)

        Also the wsj vid title. ‘the first’ are we really going to do this again? Call every new robot the first?

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          2 days ago

          Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.

          Feels like something you do to disempower eunuchs that have grown a little too cocky. Of course, this just leads to more scheming while you feel secure in having humiliated them. Just all around not something I recommend

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      10·
      2 days ago

      Baldur Bjarnason’s (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.

      (In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could’ve nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.

      (And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.

      on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he’ll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he’s concealing it, I don’t like the association whether he’s open about it or not.

      on the… third hand? when i’ve read his posts, i’ve found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he’s an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn’t interested in trying to make that article happen

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        i’ve listened to his podcast, i’ve read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart.

        For comparison I’ve only read Ed’s articles, not listened to his podcasts, and I was unaware of his PR business. This doesn’t make me think his criticisms are wrong, but it does make me concerned he’s overlooked critiquing and analyzing some aspects of the GenAI industry because of these connections to those aspects.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        looks pretty good to me, I’d be delighted to produce this sort of work and he’s doing loadbearing work on the numbers here - that the finance press is faintly catching up to a year later.

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          6 hours ago

          Its too bad that Patrick McKenzie sided with the promptfondlers because he was a useful ally calling “we need more reporting on cryptocurrency by journalists who can read a balance sheet and do arithmetic”

      • Jonathan Hendry@iosdev.space
        9·
        2 days ago

        @sc_griffith

        He, or someone, should work with Bethany McLean on checking Zitron’s work. She cowrote The Smartest Guys In The Room about Enron in 2003 and a book about the 2008 financial crisis. In 2001 she wrote about thinking something was hinky about Enron’s financial filings.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        I think Zitron has posted that none of these companies is profitable. Midjourney claims to be making a profit since 2024 although that depends on not paying for the IP they use etc. etc. etc. (and private companies can claim all kinds of things about their balance sheets without the CEO going to jail if they are creative).

          • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
            2·
            6 hours ago

            none

            When faced with a long complicated argument outside your competence, its a really useful heuristic to spot-check a few sections and assume that if they are wrong the whole structure is flawed. And at least as many readers will take away the soundbites like “none of these companies is profitable” and “pathetic revenues” as any nuanced version that is hidden in there. At critics of spicy autocomplete go he is really far on the “pundit” end of the “academic to pundit” scale (well past our David Gerard).

            • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
              2·
              4 hours ago

              i see. i misunderstood your previous post, thought you meant that “none of these companies is profitable” is essentially his only conclusion and that you considered it justifiable enough

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”

      Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Zitron was a blogger now, doing enjoyable bloggy things like hanging rude epithets on CEOs and antagonizing the normie tech media. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, the hosts of the New York Times’ relatively bullish Hard Fork podcast, quickly became prime targets. They’re too friendly with their subjects, says Zitron, who called Hard Fork a case study in journalists using “their power irresponsibly.” He recalls having pitched Newton once in his capacity as a flack, but nothing came of it. Newton, for his part, remembers meeting Zitron somewhere, maybe a decade ago, and Zitron saying something like, “I would really like to be friends.” Nothing came of that, either.

      I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron

      TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.

  • EponymousBosh@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, “a total fucking douchebag.”