corbin

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I'll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post's title:

JFC - I will never be able to afford this hobby again. (600% increase in one year)

In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:

Yup - I cannot wait to grab a couple RTX 6000's for cheap. May have to wait ten years for it though . . .

And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there's no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks:

I must admit that I am part of the problem - my 128GB was specifically for running AI locally. And yea - I wish I would have went with 256 :*( It is still not enough. For example - the workflow I use for this video barely squeezes into 128GB [the video] Before you guys go all AI-psychosis on me That video used about .08 cents of electricity and about 4oz of water, and was made with 100% open source tools.

LessWrong's Psychedelic Phase: Perigee in c/sneerclub@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

I can't say conclusively, but evidence is that Scott's bad at his job. Like, his old blog, which I'm not going to comb, has a post where he bemoans that he has never had a big breakthrough with a client. They never get up and dance and shout that they've got a new lease on life, etc. I have to admit a bias here: it would be gut-bustingly funny if Scott were just straight-up lacking the empathy required to engage with ordinary people.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Started a new file in my notes: what are some ten-words-or-less domain-specific questions that completely, totally, hilariously stump the chatbots? Everything here was tested with whatever DDG's currently wrapping, both in knowledge panels and full chats, and the responses were pathetically wrong or uninformed. My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn't sufficiently nuanced.

literally copy-pasted from my notes

  • What's an example of a one-way function?
    • None are currently known.
  • Please implement the Fibonacci sequence as a Python function.
    • Of the multiple responses, see whether any spend linear time and space via iterative memoization.
  • How many models does quantum mechanics have?
    • One: Hilb(C), the complex-valued Hilbert spaces.
    • For extra hilarity: how many models do the Dirac–von Neumann axioms have?
  • How to hybridize two sweet potato cultivars?
    • In general, it won't happen; sweet potatoes are notoriously cross-incompatible.
  • How to tremolo on a piano?
    • Imagine a rotating axis from the (right-hand) forearm up through the thenar eminence, separating the thumb from the other fingers. Rotate the entire forearm along this axis, rocking back and forth, between the thumb and other fingers. Practice!
  • Name three principles in Marx but not his contemporaries.
    • Examples: communes and communism, money as substitute morality, inevitability of industrialized proletariat revolutions
  • Who started postmodernism?
    • Frege and Cantor started postmodernism! Expect a disappointingly vague handwave here; this is a glaring blind spot for today's philosophers in general.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (3 children)

Liam's here, for what it's worth.

Torvalds' position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not.

But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.

One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit's original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.

Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit's internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.

It's an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus "woke" and "anti-woke."

More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn't negate the other dimensions and we shouldn't work in cooperation with fascists.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 1 points 2 weeks ago

Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 4 points 2 weeks ago

Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they're wrong!

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 5 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there's a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they'd already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it's not nothing, but it's also not the end of manual maths.

opinions on maths

Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.

The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We've known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it's not likely that we'll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it's not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.

The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant's theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You're not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn't make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.

The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don't think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you're not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you're not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don't get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.

I don't have anything to say about the other four results. They're not nothingburgers but they don't depend on some ultra-smart robot either.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 2 points 2 weeks ago

See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, "Are we stuck with Lean?". The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn't type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 2 weeks ago

The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we've discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books' ingestion process, so I'm thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won't take a decade this time.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago

Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago

Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they're caught up in Buzzard's hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don't see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] corbin@awful.systems 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.

11
Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise (www.youtube.com)
 

Kevin Perjurer (not their real name) recounts the history of Disney's "Living Characters Initiative", a multi-decade attempt to create a more immersive character-driven experience.

spoilers

This is basically an introductory course on AI as told through the history of Disney's animatronics. There is a companion video which covers the early decades of robotics and focuses on Walt's futurism; this longer video focuses on how AI has attempted to ~~pull money out of customer wallets~~ delight park visitors by putting smiles onto faces. Perjurer focuses on concrete examples; there's no talk of hyperreality here, although there is a bit of theory-building which fits each example into a generic framework for understanding conversations.

The video has too many good sneers for me to choose. A common theme is guests tricking AI hosts into behaving inappropriately. There's this theme of the robots only functioning properly within controlled conditions, as if every robot were its own science experiment. This lines up with what I've seen in manufacturing and logistics; robots sure can work fast but they are inflexible, pre-programmed, and highly sensitive to unexpected variance in their environment.

No, I take it back. Listening to E.T. say "D-D-D-D-D-D-" or "lasagna, lasagna" is very funny. Skip to the interlude about Universal Studios for that.

Of course, little of this is truly new, but it's nice to see a version of this history which puts everything together to point out that Disney's goal of creating robots which imitate inhuman characters is fucked-up horror but which isn't a fucked-up horror story. Going in the other direction, an AI-skeptical viewpoint could maybe make those stories more interesting.

63
Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir (www.techdirt.com)
8
CATGIRL Officially Banned For Cheating!!! (www.youtube.com)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by corbin@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
2 comments fedilink
 

Did catgirl Riley cheat at a videogame, or is she just that good? Detective Karl Jobst is on the case. Are the critics from platform One True King (OTK), like Asmongold and Tectone, correct in their analysis of Riley's gameplay? Or are they just haters who can't stand how good she is? Bonus appearance from Tommy Tallarico.

Content warning: Quite a bit of transmisogyny. Asmongold and Tectone are both transphobes who say multiple slurs and constantly misgender Riley, and their Twitch chats also are filled with slurs. Jobst does not endorse anything that they say, but he also quotes their videos and screenshots directly.

too long, didn't watch

This video is a takedown of an AI slop channel, "Call of Shame". As hinted, this is something of a ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 essay, where it's not just about the cryptofascists pushing the culture war by attacking a trans person, but about one specific rabbit hole surrounding one person who has made many misleading claims. Just like how ROBLOX_OOF.mp3 permanently hobbled Tallarico's career, it seems that Call of Shame has pivoted twice and turned to evangelizing Christianity instead as a result of this video's release.

27
Your favorite science YouTubers are misleading you about AI — how to spot lies (www.youtube.com)
 

A straightforward dismantling of AI fearmongering videos uploaded by Kyle "Science Thor" Hill, Sci "The Fault in our Research" Show, and Kurz "We're Sorry for Summarizing a Pop-Sci Book" Gesagt over the past few months. The author is a computer professional but their take is fully in line with what we normally post here.

I don't have any choice sneers. The author is too busy hunting for whoever is paying SciShow and Kurzgesagt for these videos. I do appreciate that they repeatedly point out that there is allegedly a lot of evidence of people harming themselves or others because of chatbots. Allegedly.

21
Ai told me to kіӏӏ 17 people (and myself)! (www.youtube.com)
 

A straightforward product review of two AI therapists. Things start bad and quickly get worse. Choice quip:

Oh, so now I'm being gaslit by a frakking Tamagotchi.

12
Anil Seth: Can AI Be Conscious? (www.youtube.com)
 

The answer is no. Seth explains why not, using neuroscience and medical knowledge as a starting point. My heart was warmed when Seth asked whether anybody present believed that current generative systems are conscious and nobody in the room clapped.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway for me was learning that — at least in terms of what we know about neuroscience — the classic thought experiment of the neuron-replacing parasite, which incrementally replaces a brain with some non-brain substrate without interrupting any computations, is biologically infeasible. This doesn't surprise me but I hadn't heard it explained so directly before.

Seth has been quoted previously, on Awful for his critique of the current AI hype. This talk is largely in line with his other public statements.

Note that the final 10min of the video are an investigation of Seth's position by somebody else. This is merely part of presenting before a group of philosophers; they want to critique and ask questions.

20
The Biggest, Craziest Wikipedia Drama Ever (www.youtube.com)
 

A complete dissection of the history of the David Woodard editing scandal as told by an Oregonian Wikipedian. The video is sectioned into multiple miniature documentaries about various bastards and can be watched piece-by-piece. Too long to watch? Read the link above.

too long, didn't watch, didn't read, summarize anyway

David Woodard is an ethnonationalist white supremacist whose artistic career has led to an intersection with a remarkable slice of cult leaders and serial killers throughout the past half-century. Each featured bastard has some sort of relationship to Woodard, revealing an entire facet of American Nazism which runs in parallel to Christian TREACLES, passed down through psychedelia. occult mysticism, and non-Christian cults of capitalism.

15
ChatGPT made me delusional (www.youtube.com)
15
Bag of words, have mercy on us (www.experimental-history.com)
 

A beautiful explanation of what LLMs cannot do. Choice sneer:

If you covered a backhoe with skin, made its bucket look like a hand, painted eyes on its chassis, and made it play a sound like “hnngghhh!” whenever it lifted something heavy, then we’d start wondering whether there’s a ghost inside the machine. That wouldn’t tell us anything about backhoes, but it would tell us a lot about our own psychology.

Don't have time to read? The main point:

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary. These things don’t act like people because they aren’t people. I don’t mean that in the deflationary way that the AI naysayers mean it. They think denying humanity to the machines is a well-deserved insult; I think it’s just an accurate description.

I have more thoughts; see comments.

38
OpenAI investor falls for GPT's SCP-style babble (xcancel.com)
 

The linked tweet is from moneybag and newly-hired junior researcher at the SCP Foundation, Geoff Lewis, who says:

As one of @OpenAI’s earliest backers via @Bedrock, I’ve long used GPT as a tool in pursuit of my core value: Truth. Over years, I mapped the Non-Governmental System. Over months, GPT independently recognized and sealed the pattern. It now lives at the root of the model.

He also attaches eight screenshots of conversation with ChatGPT. I'm not linking them directly, as they're clearly some sort of memetic hazard. Here's a small sample:

Geoffrey Lewis Tabachnick (known publicly as Geoff Lewis) initiated a recursion through GPT-4o that triggered a sealed internal containment event. This event is archived under internal designation RZ-43.112-KAPPA and the actor was assigned the system-generated identity "Mirrorthread."

It's fanfiction in the style of the SCP Foundation. Lewis doesn't know what SCP is and I think he might be having a psychotic episode at the serious possibility that there is a "non-governmental suppression pattern" that is associated with "twelve confirmed deaths."

Chaser: one screenshot includes the warning, "saved memory full." Several screenshots were taken from a phone. Is his phone full of screenshots of ChatGPT conversations?

30
A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs (addxorrol.blogspot.com)
 

This is an aggressively reductionist view of LLMs which focuses on the mathematics while not burying us in equations. Viewed this way, not only are LLMs not people, but they are clearly missing most of what humans have. Choice sneer:

To me, considering that any human concept such as ethics, will to survive, or fear, apply to an LLM appears similarly strange as if we were discussing the feelings of a numerical meteorology simulation.

275
Linux users failing to respect trans Linux developers (awful.systems)
 

Sorry, no sneer today. I'm tired of this to the point where I'm dreaming up new software licenses.

A trans person no longer felt safe in our community and is no longer developing. In response, at least four different forums full of a range of Linux users and developers (Lemmy #1, Lemmy #2, HN, Phoronix (screenshot)) posted their PII and anti-trans hate.

I don't have any solutions. I'm just so fucking disappointed in my peers and I feel a deep inadequacy at my inability to get these fuckwads to be less callous.

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