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.)

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    15 days ago

    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.systemsEnglish
      17·
      15 days 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

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      14 days ago

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

      The leaps in logic are so idiotic “he managed to land a rocket up right, so maybe he can pull it off!” (as if Elon personally made that happen, or as if a engineering challenge and fundamental thermodynamic limits are equally solvable). This is despite multiple comments replying with back of the envelope calcs on energy generation and heat dissipation of the ISS and comparing it to what you would need for even a moderately sized data center. Or even the comments that are like “maybe there is a chance”, as if it is wiser to express uncertainty…

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      15 days 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.

  • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    10 days ago

    OT: paying the cat tax…again. Please ignore the ash on Hector’s head, its an ongoing mystery where thats been coming from.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    16 days ago

    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

    transcript

    a 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

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      13 days ago

      robin hanson blocked me for referring to him as aella with tenure. now i think that he’s ghislaine maxwell with tenure

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      15 days 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.systemsEnglish
      10·
      15 days ago

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

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    13 days ago

    Tangentially on topic:

    Just finished The Regicide Report by friend of the instance Charles Stross. Hell of a finish to the main series! I’ll likely start a re-read of the whole series soon, and I’m hopeful that it’ll win all the awards.

    Had a couple of shower thoughts afterward:

    1. In the previous novel, a bunch of American computer bois with brainworms concocted a plan to disassemble the moon and turn it into orbital datacenters, which is lol

    2. Ghislaine Maxwell is the Iris Carpenter of pedos.

    3. Keeping speculative fiction ahead of current events must be exhausting.

    • Bloognoo@retro.pizza
      5·
      12 days ago

      @BlueMonday1984 @o7___o7

      I reread the last couple of ‘main line’ laundry files books before I dived into the latest. The complete capture of the US government by The Sleeper’s minions tracks what’s actually happened since in the US I had a panic attack and needed a day or two to calm down.
      Same thing happening in the UK now. I can t think of anywhere safe to hide.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        12 days ago

        I hear ya. I mean, Stross’s George Clooney stood and fought the horrors, while ours ran away to France. (The book really captured the unique American flavor of High Weirdness and the stickiness of Amerca’s belief in its own mythos, didnt it though?)

        In the here and now, I try to remind myself that they’re the ones who suck and that they should hide.

        When Woke 2 comes we’re going to be insuffferable.

  • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    15·
    10 days ago

    Enjoyed this piece from Mission Local on San Francisco’s “March for Billionaires” yesterday.

    Choice excerpts:

    Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had “grassroots” origins at a “little rationalist restaurant get together” in a “group house” on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.

    Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.

    This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said “I’m in a polycule with Aella,” first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie “aggressively defending billionaires.” It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.

    “People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” she said. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      10 days ago

      “People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,”

      Remember when Rationalists pretended to care about truth, steelmanning, ideological turning tests etc.

      (Also implying that billionaires are strong and attractive is funny)

      subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies

      Yall still are radical hippies. Some hippies just love the boot.

      California is, I believe, the only state to give health insurance to people who come into the country illegally,” Kauffman said nervously. “I think we probably should not be providing that.

      Rationalism, the empathy removal training center.

      “It is the intention of journalists to lie, which is why we need to not do anything to the journalists themselves, but we need to simply remove them as a class,” Annie said. “Just like Germany does to the extremist organizations.”

      Well, Germany certainly did excel at removing classes of people from society

      lol.

      Her political awakening, she added, was watching the press “constantly pump out obviously fake information” against Trump during the 2016 election instead of reporting on the “actual abhorrent views he holds.”

      Converted by Scott. (That ‘people are saying I was wrong but actually I was right’ disclaimer aged worse than the post).

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        9 days ago

        from bsky photos looks like entire gathering was 30 people. t h i r t y p e o p l e i might have counted some reporter or someone passing by randomly by accident

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    16 days ago

    The common clay of the new west:

    transcription

    Twitter 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.systemsEnglish
      14·
      15 days ago

      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.

      • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        15 days ago

        $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.systemsEnglish
          12·
          15 days ago

          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.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          15 days ago

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

          • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
            15·
            15 days ago

            and it will be trivially affordable to run them

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

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            15 days 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

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    Ryan Mac:

    Epstein had many known connections to Silicon Valley CEOs, but less known was how he made money from those relationships.

    We did a deep dive into how he got dealflow in Silicon Valley, giving him shots to invest in Coinbase, Palantir, SpaceX and other companies.

    For example, here is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam in 2014 emailing w/ people around Epstein, including crypto entrepreneur Brock Pierce, asking to meet Epstein before the financier invested $3m in Coinbase.

    Coinbase was a two year old startup. Epstein netted multimillion dollar returns from this.

    Here is Epstein asking Peter Thiel if he should invest in Spotify or Palantir. Thiel was (and still is) Palantir’s chairman and tells Epstein there is “no need to rush.” This is one of several emails where Thiel gives Epstein advice.

    Epstein later invested $40m into one of Thiel’s VC funds.

    One of @ering.bsky.social’s great file finds: Epstein tried to help create an tech fund shortly before he was arrested in 2019 with two tech types. One of his partners, however, was worried about the “optics” of telling founders that Epstein was involved.

    So they suggested Epstein conceal himself.

    At the end of his life, Epstein had assets of around $600m. A large part of that was due to his ability to get in early to hot tech deals. The returns he made off those deals helped fund his lifestyle.

    […]

    While reporting this, I had something happen that’s never happened. A comms rep for one of the co’s disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI’s chatbot.

    I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

    https://bsky.app/profile/rmac.bsky.social/post/3me4wmrgic226

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      12 days ago

      I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

      These are the people who come next election will be voting strictly according to an AI’s say so.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    15 days 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”.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      15 days ago

      R3call

      Buisness plan: daily reminders to Recall the Recall Recall. It’s memento mori for CEOs as a service.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    But why are we talking about some AI agent platform in the Urbit newsletter? Naturally because we think, Urbit fixes this.

    As a matter of fact, Tlon is already working on this with their Openclaw Plugin for Tlon Messenger. It is currently in an early adopter phase, but they expect to provide an instance of Openclaw with every ship that they host for their users.

    but of course

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    14 days ago

    Today in excellent cold opens: “I didn’t talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I’m so healthy.”

    • BioMan@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      12 days ago

      You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    10 days ago

    patio11 and tptacek are experts on daycares in Minnesota. This is very on topic for a technology website that eschews politics.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915587

    It’s a real fuckin scum scrum over there(1). Between these dorks and Mozilla Jake, it seems like every nerd-ass fash clown in tech got the memo to talk like an emotionally abusive ex with dying wizard characteristics.

    (1) even more so than ususal

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      7 days ago

      I miss when Patrick McKenzie was just sharing an American’s view on Japanese culture and reminding devs that names are not always Firstname Lastname in the Latin alphabet and ‘just’ paying yourself twice the average local income from your business is not a failure. The following is deep twitter pundit brain for a rich white man in Chicago who has lived most of his adult life in Japan and SoCal referring to social programs for poor brown people in Minnesota:

      I think journalism and civil society should do some genuine soul-searching on how we knew—knew—the state of that pond, but didn’t consider it particularly important or newsworthy until someone started fishing on camera.

      Edit. I also like the HN response which explains that private companies have few responses to fraud except refusing service, but the State of Minnesota can arrest fraudsters, command third parties to provide evidence about them, and send them to prison, so the People of Minnesota require strong evidence before it uses those powers.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        more proximately, he also went to the Manifold Markets meetup for statistical predictors that just happened to include Jordan Lasker, which is why he keeps making these posts with curiously Lasker-adjacent talking points. It’s very disappointing.

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          patio11’s sometimes bosses at Stripe are such ambitious capitalists that they sometimes scare him. Maybe his racist friends told him that the Japanese are honorary Aryans?

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        9 days ago

        I knew nothing about, and had no opinion on, daycare facilities in Minnesota run by Somali immigrants, before Trump-supporting media entities decided to make the topic an astroturf issue. On the other hand, I had plenty of experience with people whose worldviews had been severely warped by such coordinated media campaigns. Mr. McKenzie should take some time to reflect on this.

        • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          9 days ago

          Yes, I think the people who should have opinions beyond “the state government found some fraud and is investigating further cases” are people who live in Minnesota and have connections to daycare or immigrant communities. Its notorious that the NYT repackages stories by reporters in smaller orgs (or randos on social media) and puts its own spin on them! They don’t have a specific editorial line on social services in the Midwest, just instincts.