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 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.)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    2 days ago

    Some rando mathematician checks out some IQ related twins studies and find out (gasp) that Cremieux is a manipulative liar with an agenda

    https://davidbessis.substack.com/p/twins-reared-apart-do-not-exist

    Said author is sad that Paul Graham retweets the claim and does not draw the obvious conclusion that PG is just a bog-standard Silicon Valley VC pseudo-racist.

    HN is not happy and a green username calling themselves “jagoff” leads the charge

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195226

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Honestly I’m kinda grateful for people who dig into and analyze the actual data in seeming ignorance of the political context of the people pushing the other side. It’s one thing to know that Jordan “Crimieux” Lasker and friends are out here doing Deutsch Genetik and another to have someone cleanly and clearly lay out exactly why they’re wrong, especially when they do the work of assembling a more realistic and useful story about the same studies.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      Here’s the bottom line: I have no idea what motivated Cremieux to include Burt’s fraudulent data, but even without it his visual is highly misleading, if not manipulative

      Well, the latter part of this sentence gives a hint at the actual reason.

      And the first comment is by Hanania lol, trying to debunk the fraud allegations by saying that is just how things were done back then. While also not realizing he didnt understand the first part of the article. Amazing how these iq anon guys always react quick and to everything. Also was quite an issue on Reddit, where just a small dismissal of IQ could lead to huge (copy pasted) rambling defenses of IQ.

      The author is also calling Richard out on his weird framing.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        1 day ago

        It’s fascinating to watch Hanania try and do politics in a comment space more focused on academic inquiry, and how silly he looks here. He can’t participate in this conversation without trying to make it about social interventions and class warfare (against the poor), even though I don’t know that Bessis would disagree that the thing social interventions can’t significantly increase the number of mathematical or scientific geniuses in a country (1). Instead, Hanania throws out a few brief, unsupported arguments, gets asked for clarification and validation, accuses everyone of being woke, and gets basically ignored as the conversation continues around him.

        This feels like the kind of environment that Siskind and friends claim to be wanting to create, but it feels like they’re constitutionally incapable of actually doing the “ignore Nazis until they go away” part.

        1. From his other post linked in the thread he credits that level of aptitude to idiosyncratic ways of thinking that are neither genetically nor socially determined, but can be cultivated actively through various means. The reason that the average poor Indian boy doesn’t become Ramanujan is the same reason you or I or his own hypothetical twin brother didn’t; we’re not Ramanujan. This doesn’t mean that we can’t significantly improve our own ability to understand and use mathematical thinking.)
    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      Very good read actually.

      Except, from the epilogue:

      People are working to resolve [intelligence heritability issue] with new techniques and meta-arguments. As far as I understand, the frontline seems to be stabilizing around the 30-50% range. Sasha Gusev argues for the lower end of that band, but not everyone agrees.

      The not-everyone-agrees link is to acx and siskind’s take on the matter, who unfortunately seems to continue to fly under the radar as a disingenuous eugenicist shitweasel with a long-term project of using his platform to sane-wash gutter racists who pretend at doing science.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, the substacker seems either naive or genuinely misinformed about Siskind’s ultimate agenda, but in their defense Scott is really really good at vomiting forth torrents of beige prose that obscure it.

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    I got jumpscared by Gavin D. Howard today; apparently his version of bc appeared on my system somehow, and his name’s in the copyright notice. Who is Gavin anyway? Well, he used to have a blog post that straight-up admitted his fascism, but I can’t find it. I could only find, say, the following five articles, presented chronologically:

    Also, while he’s apparently not caused issues for NixOS maintainers yet, he’s written An Apology to the Gentoo Authors for not following their rules when it comes to that same bc package. So this might be worth removing for other reasons than the Christofascist authorship.

    BTW his code shows up because it’s in upstream BusyBox and I have a BusyBox on my system for emergency purposes. I suppose it’s time to look at whether there is a better BusyBox out there. Also, it looks like Denys Vlasenko has made over one hundred edits to this code to integrate it with BusyBox, fix correctness and safety bugs, and improve performance; Gavin only made the initial commit.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Apparently you can ask gpt-5.2 to make you a zip of /home/oai and it will just do it:

    https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1pmb5n0/i_dug_deeper_into_the_openai_file_dump_its_not/

    An important takeaway I think is that instead of Actually Indian it’s more like Actually a series rushed scriptjobs - they seem to be trying hard to not let the llm do technical work itself.

    Also, it seems their sandboxing amounts to filtering paths that star with /.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      They (or the LLM that summarized their findings and may have hallucinated part of the post) say:

      It is a fascinating example of “Glue Code” engineering, but it debunks the idea that the LLM is natively “understanding” or manipulating files. It’s just pushing buttons on a very complex, very human-made machine.

      Literally nothing that they show here is bad software engineering. It sounds like they expected that the LLM’s internals would be 100% token-driven inference-oriented programming, or perhaps a mix of that and vibe code, and they are disappointed that it’s merely a standard Silicon Valley cloudy product.

      My analysis is that Bobby and Vicky should get raises; they aren’t paid enough for this bullshit.

      By the way, the post probably isn’t faked. Google-internal go/ URLs do leak out sometimes, usually in comments. Searching GitHub for that specific URL turns up one hit in a repository which claims to hold a partial dump of the OpenAI agents. Here is combined_apply_patch_cli.py. The agent includes a copy of ImageMagick; truly, ImageMagick is our ecosystem’s cockroach.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        OpenAi yearly payroll runs in the billions, so they probably aren’t hurting.

        That Almsost AGI is short for Actually Bob and Vicky seems like quite the embarrassment, however.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    4 days ago

    I did it, I went and made a Official Public Comment IRL:

    In UCLA’s Strategic Plan, Goal 1 is to “Deepen our engagement with Los Angeles” and Goal 5 is to “Become a more effective institution”. By engaging with Los Angeles businesses, UCLA can get both better terms, prices, and services, and support the local economy. Buy Local, Spend Local.

    The federal government encourages this with Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer grants, among other things. Furthermore, the State of California requires a portion of its spending go toward certified Small Businesses.

    And yet, the University apparently awarded a contract reportedly worth hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to OpenAI. I have not found any documentation of an open Request for Proposals or competitive process for that award.

    My question is:

    If there was an RFP, where was it publicly posted, and if there was no RFP, why not, and were Los Angeles vendors or small businesses evaluated as alternatives, as recommended by UC policy and state law?

    Given the scale of this spending and the context of a budget crisis, transparency, compliance, and small-business participation are critical to our effectiveness and engagement.

    I’m asking for clarity on how this decision was made, how it aligns with procurement guidelines and University goals, and how DTS plans to ensure that local and small businesses are meaningfully included moving forward.

    Thank you.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      4 days ago

      What, that doesnt even make sense. I dont type what im thinking. (My only real usage of llms was trying to break them, so imagine the output of that. And you could then imagine what you think I was trying to attempt in messing with the system. But then you would do the work. Say you see mee send the same message twice. A logical conclusion would be that I tried to see if it gave different results if prompted the same way twice. However, it is more likely I just made a copy paste error and accidentally send the wrong text the second time. So the person reading the logs is doing a lot of work here). Ignoring all that he also didnt think of the next case: people using an llm to fake chatlogs to optimize being hired. Good way to hire a lot of North Koreans.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      5 days ago

      I’m legitimately disappointed in John Carmack here. He should be a good enough programmer to understand the limitations here, but I guess his business career has driven in a different direction.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        4 days ago

        Nah he has brainrot. He deadnamed and misgendered Rebecca Heinemann in his eulogy of her. Transphobia seems to really make people worse at thinking.

        (Not a big shock considering how bad his answer was towards the ‘epic own’ of the person asking him if he would hire more women. (He said: “we are having a hard time hiring all the people that we want. It doesn’t matter what they look like.”, which sounds like a great own, but leaves one big question. Why aren’t you trying to educate more people in what you want then? What are you doing to fix that problem if it is such a big problem for you? (which then leads to, how will you ensure that this teaching system has women in it, etc)))

        E: and if that doesn’t convince people he sucks: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528051421/https://www.giantbomb.com/john-carmack/3040-4576/forums/never-meet-your-heroes-john-carmack-throws-lot-in--1911724/ (this article seems to no longer exist live).

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          4 days ago

          Carmack is a Gen-X Texan mostly known for using hardmode C to code an FPS. He’s so drenched in nerd testostorone I’d be surprised if he wasn’t background radiation level non-woke. Not saying he shouldn’t be as a human being, just that it would be an uphill battle for him.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            4 days ago

            At least we have Romero. Hoe had an edgelord phase, but only when younger and realized he fucked up.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      Sure John, let me know when you’ve got that set up. Something that retains my entire search/chat history, caches the responses as well, and pulls all that into the context window when it’s time to generate a job referral. Maybe you’ll be able to do something shotgunning together remaindered hardware this time next year? I’ll be waiting.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Fun detail about this hype about ‘innovation’ (there was not just a poster but also an email) aircraft carriers use physical chits and a table for their planning. (Bonus, cant be hacked or emped). So gonna be fun to see if he will try to get rid of that and we might see a carrier sunk in the venezuelan/taiwan wars.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    4 days ago

    Slopocalypse Now h/t The Syllabus

    For context, Kunzru wrote the novel Red Pill a few years back.

    Candace is a pioneer. Following her, we are exiting the age of the public sphere and entering a time of magic, when signs and symbols have the power to reshape reality. Consider the “Medbed,” a staple of QAnon-adjacent right-wing conspiracy culture. Medbeds are one of the many things about which “they” are not telling “you”; they can supposedly regenerate limbs and reverse aging. How evil would you have to be to deny such a boon to We the People? In late September, Trump posted an AI-generated video of himself promoting the scam, promising that every faithful supporter would be given a card that would give them access to this magic technology. Trump posted it because it made him look good, a leader healing the sick, but also because it is a way to hyperstition a version of this fiction into reality. No one will really be cured, of course, because the Medbed doesn’t exist. Except now it is someone’s job to make sure it does: The president is a powerful magician who never tells a lie, so some loyal redhats will have to be given cards that let them lie down in some kind of cargo-cult version of a Medbed. Perhaps it will be a job for TV’s own Dr. Oz, who has crossed to the other side of the screen as the administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

    God we live in the dumbest possible world.

    This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand.

    I hope so, Jesse Welles getting on the Colbert and playing Red shows some people are moving in that direction, but is also definitely sincere-posting, and ultimately that kind of performance just doesn’t pay the bills like if he went Truck Jeans Beer. Eddington seems to have gotten under some people’s skins in an interesting way… And I’m skeptical that /any/ novel would have any impact or reach outside the NYT class, what with having to actually read something.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      Hyperstition is such a bad neologism, apparently doubleplus superstition equals self-fullfilling prophecy (transitive)? They don’t even bother to verb it properly… Nick Land got a nonsense word stuck in his head and now there’s a whole subculture of midwit thought leader wannabes parroting that shit.