this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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, and happy 4th July in advance.)

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[–] scruiser@awful.systems 1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

More the later than the former... they are better than purely marketing focused stuff pushed out by the LLM companies, and if you dig through them and read between the lines you can occasionally sift out useful details. Like here is a pretty solid sneer digging through Mythos's 'system card' and pointing out all the ways it contradicts the hype and press headlines Anthropic was pushing.

But even so they have some big problems...

  • the benchmarks the system cards reference are kind of useless and heavily gamed
  • LLM companies want to keep lots of details secret from competitors, so fundamentals like number of model weights or parameters or size/quality of the training data set or other training specs are deliberately left out
  • lots of the stuff they reference is booster garbage and/or doomer crit-hype
  • they tend to be long, wastefully so, imitating the length of academic papers without having the corresponding amount of depth or information
  • despite their length and wordiness they also neglect basic practical usage advice that isn't even proprietary (or at least would be bound to leak if you poke around with the model at all and thus not worth keeping secret in the first place). Like not even big picture stuff I mentioned in my second bullet, but really simple stuff...