Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.

16 points

The once and future king + ol’ muskrat give their most sensible total nuclear annihilation takes. Fellas, are we cooked?

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14 points

This has to be hands down the absolute dumbest take I’ve seen from Musk ever. Dude has the mental capacity of a boiled pear.

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10 points

They are both stupid men who repeat stuff they hear to make them look good. So the question is who are this time the “very smart people” that are telling numbnuts like these two that nuclear war is survivable - and by extension winnable? Because if that is the US defense establishment, then yeah we might be cooked.

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6 points

Alex Jones for one is convinced USA would “win” a nuclear war, so

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10 points
*

Considering they were saying this while having trouble doing internet radio at scale, a problem basically solved 20 years ago, I’m not sure we should listen to them.

Related to Musk, Trump and all the other fools. PrimalPoly revealing just how shallow and culture war brainwormed thinker he is.

Image Description.

Musk: Happy to host Kamala on an 𝕏 Spaces too PrimalPoly: Suggested questions for Kamala:

  1. How do crypto blockchains work, & why are so many Americans skeptical of Central Bank Digital Currencies?

  2. How would you stop the US gov’t from colluding with Big Tech social media companies to censor Americans?

  3. What is the main cause of inflation?

  4. What is a woman? Description ends, question I have for anybody with a screenreader, does this spoiler method work? And also does the screenreader properly work with the letter: X as used on twitter, namely 𝕏.

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9 points
  1. They don’t & yall are “skeptical” of ID cards because it’s the Mark of the Beast, so go figure
  2. Easy, regulate Big Tech to the ground until there’s only Small-to-Medium Tech left
  3. Air, most of the time.
  4. Your mom.

Can I be a VP or at least Chief of Staff now

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4 points

You have all my votes!

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8 points

5.) Why do people keep calling us weird?

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8 points

“Well If you had read my paper on evolutionary psychology I did while looking at sex workers, accusations of weirdness is a actually sign of …”

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2 points

Spoilers are an html element so they should work everywhere. Mastodon just shows the text without spoiler or CW. Letters in a different typeface specified by Unicode are announced the same as regular letters for this purpose, emphasis, to the dismay of mathematicians that would want “double-stroke X” to be announced.

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9 points
14 points

I cannot get over the fact that this man child who is so concerned with “the future of humanity” is both out right trying to buy the presidency and downplaying the very real weapons that can easily wipe out 70% of the Earth’s population in 2 hours. Remember ya’ll, the cost of microwaving the world is negligible compared to the power of spicy autocomplete.

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9 points

Watching this election has been amazing! LIKE WOAH what a fucking obviously self destructive end to delusion. Can I be optimistic and hope that with EA leaning explicitly heavier into the hard right Trump position, when it collapses and Harris takes it, maybe some of them will self reflective on what the hell they think “Effective” means anyways.

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7 points

The Bismarck Analysis crew were sneering at Sagan being a filthy peace activist so I would hazard that the era of ‘survivable nuclear war’ rides again.

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16 points

let’s see how things are going on twitter

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17 points

friend looked at this and said “ah race science geoguesser guy”

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14 points

Genomeguesser

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13 points
*

“Inexplicable Cimmerian Vibes” is the name of my next band.

Bonus points if this turns out to be the output of an LLM trained by phrenologists.

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5 points

“Inexplicable Cimmerian Vibes”

But all the band members have the Homer Simpson bodytype. Sadly Okilly Dokilly stopped.

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12 points
*

omg, next time my wife asks me how she looks, I’m definitely dropping that “legible magyar admixture”

Edit: Didn’t work. She started talking about how in the old country, the Hungarians chased her family out of the village for being religious minorities. I give this approach 0 bags of popcorn and a magen david.

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8 points

“Babe, you’re looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, you’re an M-438.”

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9 points
*

When you really want to confuse your astronomy post-doc partner.

EDIT: I’ve been reliably informed that that’s too many Messier objects.

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10 points

That’s certainly one approach to commenting on someone’s picture. Pretty sure it’s better to stick with the standard “Wow! 😍😍😍” but this certainly sticks out from the crowd?

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7 points

the original is one of the new approach from the Dimes Square nazis, isn’t it?

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8 points

In another forum I’m in, someone posted this article and asked if someone, anyone could understand it. I kept schtum.

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10 points

In particular she felt like Anna, whom she’d been closest with, was being dishonest about what they hoped to achieve with this whole project. Sanje further alleged that Anna’s good standing largely stemmed from her incomprehensibility, because people don’t have a clue what this is actually all about. Possibly Anna doesn’t, either.

most straightforward hegelian

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8 points

jfc what did I just spend 20m reading

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7 points

I got as far as “Dimes Square bohemians” in the fourth sentence before realizing that everything in that article I recognized, I would regret.

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6 points

Haela Hunt-Hendrix, the singer from the black metal band Litvrgy, was one of the principal organizers of this “symposium.” […] Besides making music, she seems to be interested in esoteric religious themes, numerology, and Orthodox iconography. In any case, Hunt-Hendrix claimed that Anna was stealing her ideas and twisting them in a “cryptofascist” manner.

Oh no! How could she!

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5 points

Hegelian e-girls’ VIP “symposium”

Excuse the rather formal philosophical latin but qvid in fvck?

I tried looking through the post to find out what possibly they could have to do with Hegel and found

Thankfully, Matthew shared the Googledoc the e-girls had sent him with their prepared remarks. My commentary over the next several paragraphs will only make sense if you read over them (they’re mercifully short), so I’d urge everyone to open up the hyperlink and give it a quick look.

Okay, first of all, it’s like 5 pages, “mercifully short” lol, go take a hike. Second,

Concrete philosophizing means applying insight to the alchemical transformation of everyday life.

This is in the first paragraph. I feel like reading this would make me devolve into an entire day of incoherent screaming and I have enough respect for my coworkers and loved ones to not subject them to that

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15 points

I found the most HN comment of all time:

What sort of mating strategy are you optimizing for?

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12 points

Optimizing mating strategies? But I’m terrible at chess!

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10 points

please tell me the topic was repopulating endangered species of animals

oh who the fuck am I kidding, it’s the orange site

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13 points
*

we’re talking about the endangered species of white cishet males here please don’t demean this important topic with jokes

Edit I wish I was joking but a luser with a classical Greek-ish handle replies

Women are optimizing 80% of men out of the gene pool.

What the men do is irrelevant.

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7 points

What the men do is irrelevant.

What most of the orange site frequenting men do is indeed irrelevant, though for different reasons than they think.

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5 points
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9 points

That’s the state of the job market these days: even the pick-up artists have STEM degrees.

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14 points

This came up in a podcast I listen to:

WaPo: "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say "

archive link https://archive.is/E3M2p

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

While I’m not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe they’re building the P(doom) machine.

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10 points

I mean, if you play on the doom to hype yourself, dealing with employees that take that seriously feel like a deserved outcome.

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8 points

Short story: it’s smoke and mirrors.

Longer story: This is now how software releases work I guess. Alot is running on open ai’s anticipated release of GPT 5. They have to keep promising enormous leaps in capability because everyone else has caught up and there’s no more training data. So the next trick is that for their next batch of models they have “solved” various problems that people say you can’t solve with LLMs, and they are going to be massively better without needing more data.

But, as someone with insider info, it’s all smoke and mirrors.

The model that “solved” structured data is emperically worse at other tasks as a result, and I imagine the solution basically just looks like polling multiple response until the parser validates on the other end (so basically it’s a price optimization afaik).

The next large model launching with the new Q* change tomorrow is “approaching agi because it can now reliably count letters” but actually it’s still just agents (Q* looks to be just a cost optimization of agents on the backend, that’s basically it), because the only way it can count letters is that it invokes agents and tool use to write a python program and feed the text into that. Basically, it is all the things that already exist independently but wrapped up together. Interestingly, they’re so confident in this model that they don’t run the resulting python themselves. It’s still up to you or one of those LLM wrapper companies to execute the likely broken from time to time code to um… checks notes count the number of letters in a sentence.

But, by rearranging what already exists and claiming it solved the fundamental issues, OpenAI can claim exponential progress, terrify investors into blowing more money into the ecosystem, and make true believers lose their mind.

Expect more of this around GPT-5 which they promise “Is so scary they can’t release it until after the elections”. My guess? It’s nothing different, but they have to create a story so that true believers will see it as something different.

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6 points

Yeah, I’m not in any doubt that the C-level and marketing team are goosing the numbers like crazy to keep the buuble from bursting, but I also think they’re the ones that are most cognizant of the fact that ChatGPT is definitely not the Doom Machine. But I also believe they have employees who they cannot fire because they would spread a hella lot doomspeak if they did, who are True Believers.

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7 points

I also believe they have employees who they cannot fire because they would spread a hella lot doomspeak if they did, who are True Believers.

Part of me suspects they probably also aren’t the sharpest knives in OpenAI’s drawer.

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4 points

Well, it’s now yesterday’s tomorrow and while there’s an update I’m not seeing a Q* announcement.

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4 points

Q*

My understanding is that it was renamed or rebranded to Strawberry which itself nebulous marketting maybe it’s the new larger model or maybe it’s GPT-5 or maybe…

it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think my point is, they made some cost optimizations and mostly moved around things that existed, and they’ll keep doing that.

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14 points

The wikipedia page for TESCREAL is “disputed”, always a good sign when the online right launches skirmish actions against front-line trenches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

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15 points

‘TESCREAL’ refers to a nonsense conspiracy theory that disparages people such as Nick Bostrom without citing any sources that are credible on the question of whether Nick Bostrom is an ‘evil eugenicist’ or whatever.

WP:LOL. WP:LMAO even.

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12 points
*

I’m ok with this because everytime Nick Bostrom’s name is used publicly to defend anything, and then I show people what Nick Bostrom believes and writes, I robustly get a, “What the fuck is this shit? And these people are associated with him? Fuck that.”

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10 points

A credible source on whether Nick Bostrom is a weirdo is Nick Bostrom cited verbatim

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