TechTakes

2689 readers

435 users here now

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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th September 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 day ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I am also questioning OpenAI’s strategy of strip-mining math for PR, since it seems like advances in math do not actually register that well in the public.

They want to sell the claim that they've "achieved AGI". For the general public they can sell on the vibe of "the computer talks back to you", but for more sophisticated audiences, they need something firmer. Everyone with even a fraction of the ability to think for themselves has stopped trusting benchmarks, so OpenAI and Anthropic has been looking for things associated with intelligence they can claim success on. Math proofs have the property of being somewhat automatically checkable, having lots of ideas scattered throughout the literature to let their LLMs sift through, and being associated with intelligence.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago

And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it'll get them arXiv posts.