this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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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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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th November 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 3 days ago by self@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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 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.)

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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

(edit: advance warning that clicking these links might cause eyestrain and trigger rage)

so for a while now sheer outrageous ludicrous nonsense of the trumpist-era USA politics has been making a bit of an impact on the local ZA racists (and, weirdly, not only the white nationalists but also the black nationalists - some of it has shone through in EFF and BFLF propaganda strains), and I knew that with the orange godawful-king ascension to his hoped-throne it was only a matter of time before shit here escalated

anyway, it's happened. the same organisation also put up some ads along the main highway ahead of the G20 summit

(upside: some of those have already been pulled down. downside: the org put up some more. don't know what's happened with the latest yet)

fuck these people

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (8 children)

SoftBank Cashes Out Nvidia Stock (Archive)

I'm too jaded to get my hopes up, but wouldn't it be so nice if this were the beginning of the end for the AI bubble?

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[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A fact-generative AI, you say? https://aphyr.com/posts/398-the-future-of-fact-checking-is-lies-i-guess

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

TIHI

I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago (8 children)

Via Reddit!SneerClub: "Investors’ ‘dumb transhumanist ideas’ setting back neurotech progress, say experts"

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Some Chat-GPT user queries were leaked via some Google Search Analytics owned by websites that ranked on the search result pages that Chat-GPT saw when searching: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/oddest-chatgpt-leaks-yet-cringey-chat-logs-found-in-google-analytics-tool/

Or something like that. It's a little confusing.

[–] rook@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago

Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.

Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders' themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!

https://www.eurogamer.net/arc-raiders-review

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about

Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):

Image descriptionTwo people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:

"It could be the work of the French!"

"Or the Dutch"

"Could even be the British!"

"Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!"

"The Russ..."

"Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch"

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren't quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

You flatter me, I haven't thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Geweldig!

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?

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[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Just so we all know, not liking AI slop code is xenophobic.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.

E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit

[–] self@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

things are happening

I'm still kicking the tires but if this works then there might be a bit of downtime soon to make sure scrapers see more of this

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

oh you fucking know it

also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal

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[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

On this topic I've been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?

[–] self@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago (1 children)

nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki

i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine

[–] self@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it's also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn't even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just a heads-up, I tried reading up on Iocaine and the project website is giving me the madlibs nonsense version on my phone's browser, so I hope the version you're planning to enable here isn't quite as aggressive (the making.awful link is currently working for me).

Between this and Cloudflare's geolocation provider no longer saying my IPv6 address block is in Russia, I'm hopeful that my browsing experience might ever so slightly improve for a bit.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Link back to last week: https://awful.systems/post/6153095

[–] self@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

thanks! I tried to link it in the usual way, but I think a bug might have blanked the url box before I hit post.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Just saw this post on DHH, it’s really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html

If you’re not careful, one day you will wake up and find that you’ve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

David Hamburger-Helper

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

New singularity dropped and I'd missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents

I don't really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

users trade off decision quality against effort reduction

They should put that on the species' gravestone.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Beff Jezos and friends have produced something other than tweets. Possibly. Maybe.

https://youtu.be/Y28JQzS6TlE

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

If you're having yield problems, talk to that dude with his nose uncovered in the clean room @4:18

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@dgerard @JFranek

His nostril yeast is the secret sauce.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Pivot to bio-computing

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Trad wives exchanging starter cultures for artisinal CPU wafers

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 3 points 2 days ago

@dgerard @JFranek

"If you're having yield problems,
I feel bad for ya, son"

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

What's the elevator pitch for Extropic again? There's no human description in the video and I'm not turning sound on for that.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.

Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

"what if computation was more wrong but on the other hand was faster and used less power"?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

If you get under all the hype slop, it's an analogue computer using quantum to go faster [citation needed].

This can allegedly be used to do AI computations (so matrix math?) with lower energy.

At least they don't claim to be doing qubits.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Everything about this screams vaporware.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

Extropic have been burning their runway, this is 100% an investor pitch. "We have a thing! please give us more money? we swear we're still Nazis"

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago

Technopagans

Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.

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