this post was submitted on 02 Feb 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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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Want to wade into the snowy 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. A lot of people didn't survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account's cake day, too, so that's cool.)

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[–] rook@awful.systems 1 points 28 minutes ago

Bit early to celebrate, but every bit of grit in the wheels of the llm machine is welcome: Microsoft is walking back Windows 11’s AI overload — scaling down Copilot and rethinking Recall in a major shift

  • recall might be rethought, again
  • copilot integration in the most stupid places (notepad, paint, maybe others) “under review”
  • no new copilot integration with other tools that ship with windows

Still plenty of other ai projects going full steam ahead, but promotion in plenty of tech companies and especially microsoft comes with being associated with a product launch, and if you’re smart what happens after the launch is someone else’s problem. I wouldn’t be surprised to see plenty of this stiff clinging on until it reaches consumers, and then being immediately “scaled back”.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

Protos: Brock Pierce’s dark and disturbing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

Re datacenters in space:

Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862222

Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862170

Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435):

it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power

We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.

edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun's power. A few trillionths per year.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 57 minutes ago

SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.

Truly a conundrum worthy of the XXI century

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 41 minutes ago

1,604 comments jfc

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago

Quick PSA: Not by AI is made by AI bros to help their slop machines violate the commons more effieicntly

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago

Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo

Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continues...

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 8 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The common clay of the new west:

transcriptionTwitter post from @BenjaminDEKR

“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren't careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The "Heartbeat" cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, ("remind me tomorrow to get milk")”

Continuation of twitter post

“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied "HEARTBEAT_OK" 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:

  • Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
  • 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
  • Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking "is it daytime yet?" every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude "no, it's still night." The problem is:
  1. Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
  2. Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
  3. Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That's $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.”
[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.

https://bsky.app/profile/rusty.todayintabs.com/post/3mdrdn3uu7226

There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150

Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:

  • Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must've done a bit more than that to get banned)
  • Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
  • Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.

Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it's obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That's not sustainable.

I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 5 hours ago

thankfully temporarily free

god I can’t wait for the subsidies to end

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 6 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they're eating is good?

As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?

They think it's just that they're early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who's to say, and so on and so forth.

Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Tired: it's required to taste

Wired: it's an acquired taste

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 5 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I guess I can check back in six months to see how they're doing ... wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, weren't they? That's a bummer.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

Well, sure, but that was six months ago.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

they're already pivoting to the narrative that "local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them"

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 21 minutes ago

i still think that lots of people damaged by chatbots will stop in their tracks when this vc money burning charade ends, they won't be able to set up it all locally because chatbots brainrotted them even if it was possible in the first place

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago

and it will be trivially affordable to run them

ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

The Comics Journal: I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago

The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.

And goddamn:

his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.

I didn't realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago

Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

In other news, Larry Garfield of GarfieldTech has had enough of the bullshit fountains, and put out a fury-filled sneer in response.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 19 hours ago

Don't want to use AI because it's built on copyright infringement and literally destroying the planet? Well, I guess you can't work in software anymore, sorry. It is what it is.

Every time someone like Jeffrey Way says "it is what it is," it makes it so. It is not inevitable just because Sam Altman tells his over-leveraged investors it is so. It becomes inevitable when you, you personally, decide that you just don't want to think about the externalities or put in the work to find better alternatives.

We are making this choice. But really, that means you have already decided for me. And I curse you and the ground you walk on for it. No, I'm not joking or exaggerating. Burn in hell.

10/10 No notes.

[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Some suggestion here that notbyai.fyi is an ai industry op: https://social.treehouse.systems/@imbl/115978426251286619

Seems plausible. Notbyai seems pretty keen on ai, and is very relaxed about what counts as “not by ai”, and adds up to a scheme whereby you pay a pro-ai techbro a monthly subscription to advertise to ai firms that your website is ideal for scraping training data from.

but here's the fucking kicker. the "founder", allen hsu (notbyai.fyi/about), is the ux design lead at modo modo (modomodoagency.com/leadership), which is an ai design company (modomodoagency.com/about)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is cool and we embrace it. But when it comes to solving complex business problems, we don’t just press a few keys to generate answers with ChatGPT. We research, interview, brainstorm, and go through a human-centric process to come up with content and solutions that are tailored to your unique business need.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 21 hours ago

Called it, 2 years ago: https://lobste.rs/c/fhob3x

actually didn't call, had forgotten all about it

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

THe whole federation loves nolto.social, an open source, federated alternative to linkedin! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the noto.social is vibe-coded

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I’m confused that anyone thinks that the world needs another linkedin…

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 5 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Lots of people in IT have been fired and must find a new job.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

Honest question, since I’m not on linkedin (and kinda looking for a new job): does it really help anyone find a job? It has been my impression from the outside that it’s mostly empty drivel.

[–] rook@awful.systems 6 points 19 hours ago

I think there might have been a golden age of recruitment on linked in, and it might have passed. A friend of mine has been a CTO at a couple of small places, and recruited a whole bunch of their employees via linkedin but now finds that there’s just too much genai bullshit now and it is becoming uneconomical to find real candidates there. The problem isn’t linkedin-specific, but I think it has been hit pretty had.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago

In ~9 months of searching, I've gotten to two second-round interviews out of dozens of applications to LinkedIn listings. Take that as you will.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 3 points 16 hours ago

Thanks everyone for the replies <3 Guess I should make an account there after all… bleeeh :/

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 20 hours ago

Anecdata here, I've been unemployed 2 times in the last 3 years and both times I mostly used LinkedIn to look for leads. Had some ok comms with recruiters too .

Depends on where you are and what kind of jobs you're looking for but for computer janitoring like me it worked ok

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (4 children)

once again, the facade of the "whoops, bad company" falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask

transcripta quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: "So what's the deal with this ghastly woman again? She's a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?"

the quoted tweet by aella reads: "There's apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?"

also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it's a sock

[–] lurker@awful.systems 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

"pro-billionaire" sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little. Also the billionaires are the ones rushing to create the thing so many rationalists claim is an existential risk, why the fuck would you support them??

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 17 hours ago

Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody

[–] sansruse@awful.systems 2 points 16 hours ago

i don't find that name too strange, it's a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth

[–] rook@awful.systems 2 points 20 hours ago

Someone has a program to steal people’s entire codebases using malicious ai coding assistant extensions.

https://www.koi.ai/blog/maliciouscorgi-the-cute-looking-ai-extensions-leaking-code-from-1-5-million-developers

(note, it is an ai firm posting this, compete with cutesy slop hero image)

The vscode extensions actually do exactly what they advertise, it’s just that they also take all your code and share it with a third party for whatever purpose.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv

No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there's no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up

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