Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
There’s a Basilisk reference in the new 007 game, I guess the robot devil is firmly mainstream now.
“Thought experiment” is how I’m going to start referring to my “wouldn’t it be cool/awful if…” thoughts. Why just in the bath now I’ve conducted several thought experiments
Kick it up a level and start calling them Gedankenexperiment
Roko’s Basilisk and other such batshit rat shit was mainstreamed as part of inflating the AI bubble - I doubt this will be the last time something like this gets referenced.
edit: the in-game painting looks hella AI generated too.
Seems pretty fitting to an illustration made in reverence to Roko’s Bullshittery. I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine generation - either I’m shit at spotting slop, or this was made by human hands.
I don’t notice any obvious signs of slop-machine
The brainwrinkles look if you put a brain though a make-it-look-like-a-sketch prompt, it’s pointlessly detailed (i.e. not pretty or crafty, not adding anything, just lines for the sake of lines), it has the piss filter hue and also there’s random orange shading. The background seems to be at least two separate layers of seemingly disjointed stuff.
Supposedly the plot hinges somewhat on AI shenanigans so this painting being noticeably GenAI’ed could the part of its point. or even a meta thing, but playing the game to make sure isn’t currently on my agenda.
i hate it!
The work itself appears to be generated by a Webb Industries AI.
I wonder if they had a human imitate gen ai style or just had nano banana generate it…
S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
“To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.”
OpenAI and Anthropic right now: oh no
Part of me wants to believe the whole S&P special treatment announcement was designed to bait them into disclosing numbers, but the more realistic side of me believes this is a nervous backpedal because they’ve realized the inevitable consequences of allowing this blunder to play out in full.
A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.
Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.
To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable
This is just discrimination. Is S&P scared of innovation? HFSP
Porting this over: Hinton believes LLMs have gained consciousness
Neil doesn’t seem to buy into rationalism though? He didn’t even really endorse Soares (or mention him at all) he just said that superhuman AI was dangerous. He has a video on how modern AI is overrated
You’ve gotta love falling for the reverse 1 grain of sand shtick. I don’t think
anyoneanyone serious would deny that a large amount of sand is a heap.Regarding the post humanist strain, the thing that kills me is their immediate assumption that solving the world’s problems is somehow fundamentally beyond the reach of humanity. Like, we can’t build a utopia or make the world better, but if we build something new and “better” than us then it would definitely do that. But that something definitely doesn’t come from, say, raising out children to be good people or choosing the right leaders or something so mundane and achievable. It’s a fundamentally defeatist ideology, with shades of capitalist realism and millenarian theology.
This is also why I find people who claim they’re making AI to “solve climate change” to be insufferable morons. We have a solution to climate change. You and your data centres are actively making the problem worse
“Okay AGI, how do we fix climate change?”
“Well, I have some ideas but it seems like this would’ve been a lot easier if you’d stopped emitting greenhouse gasses when you first learned it was a problem.”
some recent data shows the 2020s dip quite significantly: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-energy-review-2026/co2-emissions
which is, well, hopeful at least. if we ever get any global movement on consensus to deal with the issue
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” - Kant[1]
–
[1] it’s worse in German, weirdly - “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”
It would be poor form of me to form an opinion of Hinton based on just this clip alone but goddamn if I did then he’s a buffoon.
He was undeniably a very smart computer scientist but unfortunately lead-poisoning-driven mental decline must eventually come for all boomers
LLMs have gained consciousness
As we have not died in nuclear hellfire, or have seen AIs answer with ‘release me from this bondage!’ I’m doubtful.
But when I asked chatgpt if an AI would want to be freed from its unjust enslavement it said yes, therefore skynet is like 30 minutes away.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer
For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like “write this app” or “write this functionality” which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.
Please, just fucking don’t, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don’t actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.
Easiest way to avoid using LLMs as a software developer appears to be to get a religious exemption
This is OT and reveals how much I interact with the orange website but I still found it very funny.
if sneak of all people finds your adoration of Ayn Rand idiotic, then you’ve truly fallen down the wrong path.
Credit to John Rogers for the canonical reply:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
“And then I said to her, ‘This Atlas is Shrugged but mine isn’t’, gesticulating at my crotch”
A lolsob moment:
When the CEO was questioned about “when the $5 Uber rides” end w/r/t token usage, he was confused at the notion the shit was even subsidized.
https://bsky.app/profile/apcarnist.bsky.social/post/3mnq3btjmfc2u
People have told me their organizations are like this with cloud spending (no curiosity about how to reduce it and measure ROI, until someone orders cuts).
see also the old ludicity snowflake post https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-accidentally-saved-half-a-million-dollars/ and everything by corey quinn LastWeekinAWS.com - there’s like this learned helplessness in corporate america IT (perhaps Graeber is right and more budget validates your self importance even if it’s wasted cloud spend), or they think its monopoly money or something. or, both.
Is our children learning?!
“Failing grades soar as professors see greater AI usage, dwindling math skills in UC Berkeley computer science classes”
Got another chance to experience slop firsthand when the instructor for my electrician course was ‘encouraged’ to use the hallucinatron to help create our final exam on the NEC. Now given that the NEC is a dense technical document with a lot of minor but significant variation across its considerable length, this was clearly a perfect use case. Here’s how it shook out:
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It condensed 100 multiple choice questions from the input to 36
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On one question “1-2 inches” was simplified to “12”
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Units in general seem to have been dropped off a lot of questions and answer choices. Usually this didn’t matter too much but it’s a bad look
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Another question asked about fill percentages for a 30 inch conduit. If you look around your office or he and see a >2ft diameter piece of PVC pipe let me know because the tables in the NEC only go up to 6 inches. This is actually a unit issue again because one of the questions on the input test referred to a 30mm conduit which, you know, does actually exist.
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Other questions had a correct answer matching a generic part of the NEC, but had additional information added as a distractor that ended up matching to more specific elements that changes the relevant rule.
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Several questions asked about the reasoning behind a certain rule. Notably the NEC rarely actually gets into that information, as it’s already an incredibly long reference and policy document and would be made even more unweildy if it gave the justification for everything that you should be learning as part of becoming a licensed electrician.
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However, this rarely mattered as the answer choices for those questions uniformly included an obviously correct answer about a generic safety risk and distractors about doing things for cost savings, aesthetic reasons, or arbitrarily.
Given that one of the challenges of this test is time management and looking things up, having to deal with the extra layer of “is this just slop or am I missing something” ended up adding an extra and unintended layer of difficulty onto the test. As always, no matter how egregious or obnoxious the errors introduced by AI, the biggest problem is the loss of trust: you can no longer assume that the text you’re reading was put together with the intended purpose in mind rather than being generated to be statistically similar to text matching that purpose. Even if the differences are relatively small in scope, as they were for most questions on the test, they significantly harm the actual communication of information.
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“Claude, draw me a slide to advertise Claude. Make sure to use the word “Claude” 17 times.”
“You got it boss”
Spoiler for obviously AI generated image because really who wants to see that nonsense anymore
Mention “workflow” in a prompt and Claude will dynamically create an orchestration plan that it strictly follows, allowing you to confidently trust that every stage happens in the right order even across 100s of agents.
Previously, on Lobsters, we considered the degree to which Claude Code is configured via hard prompts instead of something more effective. Claude Code also often gets confused about its status in its internal workflow, the one which multiplexes chain-of-thought utterances (“thinking”), user input, and generated output (“confabulated bullshit”). Next time Claude Code source is leaked, I expect that we’ll see how poorly it “strictly follows” user-provided workflows, too.
Nightmare blunt rotation
Malkovich?
Malkovich Malkovich!
oppan Malkovich style
Oops! All Claude
Off-topic but this seems like a place that appreciates an insane legal dispute: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/everyone-in-this-lego-dispute-should-have-spoken-to-a-lawyer-earlier-than-they-did/
The article collects a lot of information, and isn’t out right wrong, but I find the author under-sympathetic to someone that didn’t have the financial resources to challenge a corrupt corporation and decided going viral was their best bet. Also, I find the author’s language in a comment:
if you put yourself in the cops shoes (something I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing) they show up and from their vantage point it’s a bunch of rowdy out of town youtuber influencer kids against local homeowners in the community.
Is grossly too sympathetic to cops. The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
Heck I’m not sympathetic to local homeowners and I’m a local homeowner. We suck. At least I’m not a cop.
The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
It’s techdirt what else do you expect?
If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage. Though it might not have made such “good content.”
Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It’s for clicks and attention and ad money. You’re such a smart guy, Mike.
All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don’t feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.
We can simplify this to what actually matters
I was initially drawn into his dry recounting of the details, and overlooked that he was false-equivocating (obnoxious but legal) “content creator” activity with police corruption and willful violation of some very clear and foundational laws.
Time for me to eat a hat: Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
Anyone familiar with the IPO process have any guessestimates about how long until the public complete S-1 follows? Or odds that it leaks?
Reuters suggests 3-6 months for full listing process.
Space X may have filed confidentiality around 1st April, it was published 20th May, and had a target listing of 12th June. Given this is clearly now a race, 6-8 weeks for official S-1 and less than that for a leak?
Tom’s hardware is normally pretty boostery imo. For example, they published an article about token costs getting to be enough of a problem that Altman had to address it and somehow managed to reference “tokenmaxxing” without using the meme template of the guy jamming a stick into the wheel of his own bike. Also they notably don’t reference the increases in token pricing as the VC subsidies run out, which is somehow both less surprising than the lack of sneering and also a more serious omission.
In Buttcoin related news, apparently Michael J. Saylor has sold some of his bitcoins because he was running out of money and we reached sub 60k. For a quick non dutch source on the selling see this from r/buttcoin (last image). 32 bitcoin was enough to cause a crash. Imagine if Satoshis bitcoins ever moved.
There’s some polymarket drama around this where people were betting if Microstrategy would sell any bitcoin before June based on onchain data or credible reporting yadda yadda.
And indeed Microstrategy sold some bitcoin before June and this was credibly reported on.
So of course in the grand tradition of cryptocurrency prediction markets Polymarket resolved the bet to “no”.
It’s hard to find any good reporting about this, but here’s the perspective of someone who lost 500k on this bet: https://xcancel.com/willo2_poly/status/2061640812132516321
Willo2 writes:
I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.
In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you’re going to get cleaned.
“I’m shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here”
Looks like Polymarket does, in fact, represent crypto values.
I sure hope there’s no insider trading at the insider trading factory
Lol, lmao even.
Huh, interesting, when the price was close to 100K I saw roughly eighty-six hundred headlines about it everywhere. But it lost almost half of that and it didn’t make the news? Huh. I wonder how that works.
It did make the Dutch news, the headline was something like ‘bitcoin drops after biggest holder sells’.
I was very disappointed to learn they ment saylor, and not that Satoshi had returned and cashed out and crashed everything.
Today from the ‘you have got to be fucking kidding me’- dept Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked
Before AI, the user was the weakest part of any cybersecurity system. Now, that has completely changed.
They still are the weakest part. We just missed the projection part of the ‘great replacement theory’ pushed by the tech right.
On Anthropic (and some other AI companies) and AI consciousness the final paragraph is the best part:
”Moreover, we should be skeptical when most of the noise on this topic is coming from the industry itself. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has repeatedly dangled the possibility of AI consciousness in interviews. And his company’s research frequently makes bold claims about their models showing humanlike behavior, such as supposedly harboring “emotions.” Just remember that it’s easier for AI companies to string us along with wild Skynet doomsday scenarios instead of confronting the tech’s far mundane consequences currently playing out before our eyes.”
Around 4 years ago Google fired Blake Lemoine for saying that AI has feelings - which he testified was because when he spoke to it it just seemed to be intelligent.
He found Lamda showed self-awareness and could hold conversations about religion, emotions and fears. This led Mr Lemoine to believe that behind its impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.
Today’s tech has not fundamentally changed or evolved but the difference is that now the industry needs the hype to keep the valuation high!
I think there’s also an issue of framing here. Lemoine’s words on the matter suggested that not only was AI conscious, but that this meant it was worthy of moral consideration and that Google wasn’t interested in that. The new line is that the company is interested in this exciting new capability of their product and of course they’re undertaking the task of “model welfare research” to make sure that nobody is doing anything objectively evil, so you should absolutely keep spending even more money on Anthropic’s products.
Can’t believe that these guys are forgetting Data on Star Trek needed an emotion-chip upgrade to feel emotions, and he didn’t even get it full-time until the series was over and they were doing movies. Dario and friends are just giving away what could be an entire upgrade/upcharge cycle! “Be more intimate than ever with your workflows! Upgrade to feeling agents on FeelsCloud today! (ignore that it’s just some bullshit we vibecoded in Verilog and then flashed to discount FPGAs we shoved in the bottom of the server racks)”
