this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
11 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1645 readers
62 users here now

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.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
11
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2 March 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 23 hours ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago

Ran across a piece of AI hype titled "Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?".

In lieu of sneering the thing, here's some unrelated thoughts:

The AI bubble has done plenty to broach the question of "Can machines think?" that Alan Turing first asked in 1950. From the myriad failures and embarrassments its given us, its given plenty of evidence to suggest they can't - to repeat an old prediction of mine, I expect this bubble is going to kill AI as a concept, utterly discrediting it in the public eye.

On another unrelated note, I expect we're gonna see a sharp change in how AI gets depicted in fiction.

With AI's public image being redefined by glue pizzas and gen-AI slop on one end, and by ethical contraventions and Geneva Recommendations on another end, the bubble's already done plenty to turn AI into a pop-culture punchline, and support of AI into a digital "Kick Me" sign - a trend I expect to continue for a while after the bubble bursts.

For an actual prediction, I predict AI is gonna pop up a lot less in science fiction going forward. Even assuming this bubble hasn't turned audiences and writers alike off of AI as a concept, the bubble's likely gonna make it a lot harder to use AI as a plot device or somesuch without shattering willing suspension of disbelief.

[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

new zitron dropped https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.

As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.

On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 hours ago

any of y'all running short on your supply of really tortured sentences? no worries, I've got a supply drop

What will count, he says, is industrial revolution-style irreversible growth.

While AI is improving fast, it remains wildly flawed

Moreover, a recent Eye on the Market [PDF] report by Michael Cembalest, chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management, questions whether the immense investments in AI and the infrastructure required to support it, already made or committed by the tech giants, will ever pay off

that paragraph doesn't punch very hard, but the (2024) pdf that it links to starts out with this as a bolded title line:

A severe case of COVIDIA: prognosis for an AI-driven US equity market

which, well, 1) immensely tortured sentence, 2) "aww poor baby, etc etc"

entertained by the rapid fire "hmm, shit, is all this worth it?" that's Ever So Suddenly boiling up everywhere. bet it's entirely unrelated to people working on quarterly portfolio reviews, tho

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:

image textJust had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.

Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.

What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.

On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.

Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (2 children)

Don't forget that the soil is incredibly toxic and that what little atmosphere exists smells like getting continuously Dutch Ovened forever

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars is... much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 5 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to Mars. The temperature is maybe in a comparable ballpark if you squint. Everything else is way easier. You can breathe the air as is instead of living in a pressure vessel with an artificial atmosphere 24/7. You have water everywhere you can simply melt or desalinate and you don't have to even go to the even colder polar ice cap region for it because you're already there. You have a magnetic field allowing for an ozone layer which is nice because the sun is a deadly lazer. There are organisms around you can eat for nutrition, and whatever resources you lack can be brought over with a boat or aeroplane instead of a spaceship. You can get to Antarctica from any human settlement (with the possible exception of space stations) or vice versa in a matter of hours. You can have near-instantaneous communication with other humans on earth at any time, whereas one-way trip between Earth and Mars will take a radio wave anywhere between 3 and 14 minutes, assuming there's not some opaque body (such as a moon or a star) in the way. I'm probably missing a lot of other stuff but that's the ones off the top of my head.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I think it isnt just toxic but also sharp, and some of the toxics might be water soluble, so could contaminate whatever water they bring, and contaminate the air. (And iirc the moon is worse but at least they are not planning a base there. Right?).

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, the moon doesn't smell like the craft trailer, I'll grant you that, but the dirt is made of razor blades, which is bad.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago

Miners lung on the moon.

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

People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. I'd be in favor, though I'd settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 12 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (4 children)

Starting the week with yet another excellent sneer about Dan Gackle on HN. The original post is in reply to a common complaint: politics shouldn't be flagged so quickly. First, the scene is set:

The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.

The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.

But this sneer goes above and beyond, accusing Gackle of steering the community's politics through abuse of the opaque flagging mechanism and lack of moderator logs:

Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.

And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.

I'm not really surprised to see folks accusing the bartender of the Nazi Bar of being a member of the Nazi Party; it's a reasonable conclusion given the shitty moderation over there. Edit: Restored original formatting in quote.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 6 hours ago

Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 12 hours ago

I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 18 hours ago

lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 19 hours ago

Isn't that his full-time job?