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 so 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.)
Ms. A reported extensive experience working with active appearance models (AAMs) and large language models (LLMs)—but never chatbots—in school and as a practicing medical professional, with a firm understanding of how such technologies work. Following a “36-hour sleep deficit” while on call, she first started using OpenAI’s GPT-4o for a variety of tasks that varied from mundane tasks to attempting to find out if her brother, a software engineer who died three years earlier, had left behind an AI version of himself that she was “supposed to find” so that she could “talk to him again.”
from here. what follows just gets more screech-inducing
damned shame they couldn’t both lose
I know. We can dream though
Hey, remember Pascal’s wager? What if we got the leader of the church to be part of our new “ai ethics” product launch https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-18/anthropic-s-co-founder-to-launch-encyclical-on-ai-with-pope-leo?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTExMTY3NCwiZXhwIjoxNzc5NzE2NDc0LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURjhGMjNLSkg2VkcwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4QjVENTdBQTJGNjY0RTdCOEQ4NkUxMzcwMDNDMkVDNCJ9.OEFYqROFrqezWHTRznaz9xKZCem4PIY99uXzZJ3bWQQ&leadSource=uverify+wall
Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.
gee I wonder why
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.
hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you
1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone
Some online dating device is demonic in the same sense as the chatbot which encouraged someone to commit suicide then initiated erotic roleplay with him.
A lot of lonely guys will do well from hiring a professional for some social dates and makeout sessions to get practice reading body language and finding some face-to-face activity with women which is not just about dating.
Fuck me for having read this… Surely there are only like 2 dozen people in the world who think like this, right?
Ope, im getting an update that it is more than 2 dozen…
“Im a fuckin sicko and no one wants to immediately fuck me”
Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem
After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is
It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.
It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.
For some reason once you start talking about space people stop thinking about it as one of many alternatives. If you want to think about industrializing space, simply being possible isn’t enough. The unique challenges of operating in orbit (of which cooling is only the most obvious among a great many problems) need to be addressable efficiently enough that sending it up still makes more sense than building it on the ground.
Microsoft’s experiments with underwater data centers serve as a powerful parallel since it has many of the same challenges but is still significantly cheaper. If it were economical to put a data center in orbit it would be even more economical to put it in an underwater container, so if we aren’t doing the latter we would need a hell of a good reason to do the former. See also the economic challenges of living on Mars, the moon, or even LEO compared to Antarctica or ocean platforms.
I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.
The worst part is that I don’t even disapprove of the project of putting people in space and keeping them alive and making more of the universe permanently habitable/inhabited. But the insistence that at present it should be an immediate priority rather than acknowledging that it’s a curiosity or a challenging test to expand our collective engineering and scientific abilities in ways that can have direct benefits elsewhere is just delusional. Like, the problem is not that we need to go to space now because there are incredible economic opportunities we’re leaving on the table. We should be funding it more just like the rest of basic research, not trying to grift the necessary funds out of a billionaire class who would rather literally light their money on fire than pay it into a democratic government.
Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg
https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923
It is an impressively bad speech.
His eyes are giving me Corinthian vibes.
I find it really funny how after he gets booed he says, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” Yeah, if you’re worried that AI is only going to fuck up science, don’t worry, it’s going to fuck up everything else as well. Was he trying to stick to a (terrible) script, or is he genuinely this incapable of reading a room?
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” No, my mom taught me about stranger danger. I know what to do when a sketchy old man named Eric Schmidt pulls up with a rocket ship that says FREE ICE CREAM.
“The rocket ship is here. Let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes. Listen.” Thanks for revealing how AI adoption is really about coercion. It doesn’t matter what you think, AI is inevitable and you ignorant Luddites are gonna have to find a way to like it.
Truly a masterclass in public speaking by Eric Schmidt. When the audience reacts negatively to what you said, just double down and shove it down their throats. You’re a billionaire, so you know better than them.
IRL Principal Skinner meme
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
obviously didn’t watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period’s analogs to Eric Schmidt
When some offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
I don’t know mate, I think I do neither of those things because the kid-diddling natalist doesn’t seem to be good at making ones that don’t go boom.
Christ what a fucking shitweasel.
When someone offers you a seat on a submarine, you do not ask which seat, you just get on
Get in losers. We’re going imploding.
Is this submarine made of carbon-fibre and is it driven with a knock-off PlayStation controller?
The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I’d get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it’s 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.
Maybe it’d work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise but somehow I doubt it.
Something tells me the interior of that sub was an RF noise-rich environment.
carbon fibre is reflective for microwaves
Don’t ask those questions just get on
Benjamin Felix is a financial planner in Ottawa aimed at people with at least $1 million to invest. He has a BEng, a MBA, was on a sports team at university. And in April he titled his latest video SpaceX and OpenAI: The Mega IPO Grift. The podcast version is called episode 406 “when massive private companies go public.”
He also uses the term “front running” from our friends in cryptocurrency.
Keeping the float (value of shares available to trade on the open market) low would enable scams like all the ways of keeping the USD price of cryptocurrency from collapsing.
I mean, the classical pitch for an IPO is the same as any other large investment, right? You get a great big chunk of capital that you can throw at scaling or improving processes or building our your manufacturing capabilities or whatever, and then that investment of capital in your business in turn generates a financial return for investors. But in an industry and world where venture capital is plentiful, it shouldn’t be surprising that when an IPO rolls around all the low-hanging fruit for improving, scaling, and stabilizing the business have already been done. Instead you’re looking for a way to let your earlier investors liquidate their returns and get actual cash that they can invest in new ventures. In the best case that means that the IPO price doesn’t move very much and it becomes a stable part of the market, but the incentives are all there to make sure the IPO overvalues the company as much as possible. I would need to do more research but I would suspect you can find an inverse relationship between venture funding and public market success in recent years, at least strong enough to expect the wheels to come off when the initial hype is pushed this high.
Mild nit: “frontrunning” was a term (and practice) in use before crapto trading.
I think the classical example was “you ask your broker to buy some shares at $20 each, the broker waits as long as possible, and if the price drops low enough it buys them for $19.80, keeps 20 cents, and tells you it paid $20.”
Edit / in fact it was “Ms. Easton, a widow of Boston, MA wants to buy $1,000 of a penny stock, so the broker buys $10, waits for her purchase to drive the price up, and sells them at a profit before going out to a showing of one of those exciting new moving pictures.”
Yep. The broker is effectively buying at $19.80 and still selling to their customer at $20.00. Now, crypto is actually innovative in just how easy this is to do. In fact it’s almost required since the transactions are processed in bulk and the miners get to decide what order all the transactions in that block go in. The public mempool also means that even if the miners aren’t doing it themselves anyone who wants to front-run basically has a whole conga line of good-faith users (suckers) to get set in front of and identify the most profitable position. Without the miner’s privilege you’ll need to deal with transaction fees and it’s going to be harder to find opportunities, but it’s so easy to search that I wouldn’t expect it to matter.
This from a while ago but I forgot about it until today: Eliezer jumpscare in this interview about Absolute Scarecrow (its very brief but is there)
on the topic of EY’s book, the ratings on Goodreads have slowly crept down (from 3.97 to 3.92)
and on the topic of ratings, the AI Doc has also gone down to an 6.9 on IMDB
That is still very high for pulp science fiction.
Might as well port this over here since I posted it late in the old thread
An actual interesting thought: If AI Causes a Mass Unemployment Crisis, Will the Public Explode Into Violence?
My opinion is yes. People absolutely despise AI and the tech companies, as we have seen time and time again, not to mention the spread of AI doom fears. The current state of America is a boiling pot as Trump gets worse and worse (and with upcoming midterms) so AI causing mass unemployment absolutely would be enough to make it boil over and cause violence
I think the more telling aspect here isn’t the possible employment impacts, it’s the fact that it’s making all the things it’s supposed to touch worse. Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits. But with AI, not only are we seeing the automation impact people’s livelihoods, it’s also making the experience of interacting with all these systems worse. I don’t know how many people outside the tech industry would care about underemployment and retraining for software engineers, but everyone can feel that the systems they rely on are less reliable, more glitchy, and uglier. Combined with the way data centers and AI companies serve as focusing points for people’s concerns, I think there’s decent odds that we see blood regardless of whether the prophecied great replacement (not that one) happens as advertised.
It isnt just causing unemployment, it is also causing drinkable water and energy problems. And apparently there might already be a wace of workers setting fire to warehouses going on in the usa (which is not being reported on if it is, not sure of it is an actual thing btw, but saw somebody on social media say the warehouse fires which they were tracking went from 100 to 150 in a short period. I do not know enough to say if this is real or somebody mistaking normal accidents with a revolution, i assume it is the former. The one fire I saw reported was due to a cost of living thing btw).
The dreaded midnight hour of oblivion!
deleted by creator
