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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
one for the arse-end of this weekās stubsack
In other news, Jazzaās AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:
Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. Heās also having an utter meltdown in the replies.
Do you think he knows that āinspiredā and āNvidia GeForce RTX 5090ā are not the same word?
Edit: oh no I read the replies.
By ābetterā, he means āmore fuckableā.
And by āmore fuckableā, he means ārefusing/unable to consentā.
Lol the guy has gotten dragged by everybody so hard for his AI stances a while back, that he now has to double down and call AI superior. Meanwhile on Yt there is now a group of people who pay rent just making āthis guy stinksā videos.
E: The ratio on the replies/qt/likes oof. (Also, lol in his āyou have already lost, I drew myself as the chad and you as the soyjakā image he drew himself as a group of children). E2: sorry closed it
In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNNās put out an article titled āAppleās AI isnāt a letdown. AI is the letdownā, whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed āThe Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumesā.
You want my take on this development, Iām with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubbleās finally nearing its end.
The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having āto correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this yearā.
Turns out that they can only stack shit so high before it falls back to earth
Taking a shot in the dark, journalistic incidents like Bloombergās failed tests with AI summaries and the BBCās complaints about Apple AI mangling headlines probably helped with accelerating that fall to earth - for any journalists reading about or reporting on such shitshows, it likely shook their faith in AIās supposed abilities in a way failures outside their field didnāt.
By refusing to focus on a single field at a time AI companies really did make it impossible to take advantage of Gel-Mann amnesia.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426
https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese
This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.
ćåćÆććę»ćć§ćć
Edit: from the English version of this project:
export type Pronoun = āIā | āyouā | āheā | āsheā | āitā | āweā | ātheyā | āmeā | āhimā | āherā | āusā | āthemā;
Ah yes, definitely the only pronouns in all of English
Is Japanese really that strict
my Japanese uncle that works at nintendo says yes. If you write ć instead of ćÆ they make you åč ¹ in front of all your friends
Using an LLM to shit out grammar for an old school symbolic language model is a poetic ouroboros of AI circlejerking.
In other news, Elon Muskās personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:
Right now, the integration is limited to āGrokās available as an optional chatbotā, but going by what Iāve seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.
Angela Collier has a wonderfully grumpy video up, why functioning governments fund scientific research. Choice sneer at around 32:30:
But what do I know? Iām not a medical doctor but neither is this chucklefuck, and people are listening to him. I donāt know. I feel like this is [sighs, laughs] I always get comments that tell me, āyouāre being a little condescending,ā and [scoffs] yeah. I mean, we can check the dictionary definition of ācondescending,ā and I think I would fit into that category. [Vaccine deniers] have failed their children. They are bad parents. One in four unvaccinated kids who get measles will die. They are playing Russian roulette with their childās life. But sure, the problem is Iām being, like, a little condescending.
For some reason itās on brand for HN to have a discussion of different dash widths stick on the front page more than 24h
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497719
Extra spice and relevance for the observation that GenAI text apparently has a lot of em-dashes in it, so add that to the frequency of the word ādelveā.
alright, fine, iāll do it.
webshit weekly (2025/03/27)
How to Use Em Dashes (ā), En Dashes (ā) , and Hyphens (-)
Grammar Nazis (as opposed to the regular kind) publish a guide on how to best calibrate your printing press to 17th-century standards. Several Hackernews (some of which are the regular kind) offer their own competing, more-detailed guides in response. The concern is raised that using too many typographic dashes makes you sound like ChatGPT, to much dismay of those still diligently copying from the Google (business model: āUber for glue pizzaā) results page for āem dashā. Multiple Hackernews take the opportunity to call the group of people who do not care about the millimeter difference between the types of dashes āNPCsā.
This was strangely comforting. A++
i aim to please
The USA plans to migrate SSAās code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/
The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.
āThis is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,ā the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. āThe leaders need to understand that theyāre dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which theyāve already stated theyāre doing, things can break.ā
SSNās pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:
SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.
What could possibly go wrong? Iām sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:
You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.
Bonus ā Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i
Bwahahaha, as I said on bsky: let them do it, canāt wait to use it as a cautionary tale of why full rewrites are a terrible idea during freshman programming lectures
Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.
When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, Iād appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the codeās behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.
Yeah Iām sure DOGE doesnāt appreciate that structured programming hasnāt always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their codeās structure to avoid calling it.
The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:
It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt ā the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required
While Iāve never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. Iāve seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).
there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense
Did my spider sense just tingle? Think the US might be in a bit of danger. Esp with the bit of āburn the boatsā tendency this all seems to have.
To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of itās own lately) and Iāve never worked in government.
But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If thereās anyone who isnāt convinced after reading all the headlines then thereās no convincing them.
details
Some news stories are still saying ācould we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?ā, but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender peopleās visas as āfraudā, and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.
I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:
-
I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, donāt think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didnāt think Iād have to be in a hurry to update it, and now Iām worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.
-
My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria
-
My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.
-
My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.
* Since Iām taking the work visa route Iāll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.
As someone living in Switzerland for over 6 years, the labor laws arenāt exactly like in the rest of Europe and people are sometimes a bit too much on the freedumb side of things. Also weird german or (possibly less weird, I donāt speak it) french and high cost of living.
Then again, itās not anywhere as bad as whatās happening in the us
Donāt worry I know (approximately) what Iām getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things donāt work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so wonāt start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but Iām at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.
weird german
When my German teacher told me she canāt understand Swiss German I thought āhaha Iām in dangerā.
-
seems bad
There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.
60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler
Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of āyoung developer hybrisā ever seen, or b) they donāt actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.
But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this: [ā¦]
Labrador retrievers ;_; Youāre getting too good at thisā¦
Thereās inarguably an organizational culture that is fundamentally disinterested in the things that the organization is supposed to actually do. Even if they arenāt explicitly planning to end social security as a concept by wrecking the technical infrastructure it relies on, theyāre almost comedically apathetic about whether or not the project succeeds. At the top this makes sense because politicians can spin a bad project into everyone elseās fault, but the fact that theyāre able to find programmers to work under those conditions makes me weep for the future of the industry. Even simple mercenaries should be able to smell that this project is going to fail and look awful on your resume, but I guess these yahoos are expecting to pivot into politics or whatever administration position they can bargain with whoever succeeds Trump.
strange Ʀons takes on hpmor :o
Good video overall, despite some misattributions.
Biggest point I disagree with: āHe could have started a cult, but he didnātā
Now I get that thereās only so much Toxic exposure to Yudās writings, but itās missing a whole chunk of his persona/Ʀsthetics. And ultimately I thing boils down to the earlier part that stange did notice (via echo of su3su2u1): āOh Arenāt I so clever for manipulating you into thinking Iām not a cult leader, by warning you of the dangers of cult leaders.ā
And I think even expect his followers to recognize the āsubterfugeā.
liked the manic energy at the start (and lol at Strange not sharing his full history (like the extropian list stuff, and a much more), like not mentioning it is fine, the scene is set), and Chekovs fedora at the start.
I like the video, but Iām a little bothered that she misattributes su3su2u1ās critique to Dan Luu, who makes it very clear he did not write it:
These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1ās identity, Iāll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement.
all of the subculture YouTubers I watch are colliding with the weirdo cult I know way too much about and I hate it
oh no :(
poor strange she didnāt deserve that :(
Strange is a trooper and her sneer is worth transcribing. From about 22:00:
So letās go! Upon saturating my brain with as much background information as I could, there was really nothing left to do but fucking read this thing, all six hundred thousand words of HPMOR, really the road of enlightenment that they promised it to be. After reading a few chapters, a realization that I found funny was, āOh. Oh, this is definitely fanfiction. Everyone said [laughing and stuttering] everybody that said that this is basically a real novel is lying.ā People lie on the Internet? No fucking way. It is telling that even the most charitable reviews, the most glowing worshipping reviews of this fanfiction call it āunfinished,ā call it āa first draft.ā
A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition of HPMOR at 26:30 or so:
Itās extremely tiring. I was surprised by how soul-sucking it was. It was unpleasant to force myself beyond the first fifty thousand words. It was physically painful to force myself to read beyond the first hundred thousand words of this ā let me remind you ā six-hundred-thousand-word epic, and I will admit that at that point I did succumb to skimming.
Her analysis is familiar. She recognized that Harry is a self-insert, that the out-loud game theory reads like Death Note parody, that chapters are only really related to each other in the sense that they were written sequentially, that HPMOR is more concerned with sounding smart than being smart, that HPMOR is yet another entry in a long line of monarchist apologies explaining why this new Napoleon wonāt fool us again, and finally that itās a bad read. 31:30 or so:
Itās absolutely no fucking fun. Itās just absolutely dry and joyless. It tastes like sand! I mean, maybe itās Yudkowskyās idea of fun; he spent five years writing the thing after all. But it just [struggles for words] reading this thing, it feels like chewing sand.
I canāt be bothered to look up the details (kinda in a fog of sleep deprivation right now to be honest), but I recall HPMOR pissing me off by getting the plot of Death Note wrong. Well, OK, first there was the obnoxious thing of making Death Note into a play that wizards go to see. It was yet another tedious example in Yudās interminable series of using Nerd Cultureā¢ wink-wink-nudge-nudges as a substitute for world-building. Worse than that, it was immersion-breaking: Yud throws the reader out of the story by prompting them to wonder, āWait, is Death Note a manga in the Muggle world and a play in the wizarding one? Did Tsugumi Ohba secretly learn of wizard culture and rip off one of their stories?ā And then Yud tried to put down Death Note and talk up his own story by saying that L did something illogical that L did not actually do in any version of Death Note that Iād seen.
And now I want potato chips.
Sorry Yuds, Death Note is a lot of fun and the best part is the Ć¼bermensch wannabeās hilariously undignified death. I guess it struck a nerve!
Life imitating āartā I suppose because Thereās actually a Death Note musical.
š¶ If I had a Death Note / Ya da shinna shinna shinna shinna gamma gamma game / All day long, Iād namey namey names / If I had my own Death Note š¶
Murderer on the Roof
A shorter sneer for the back of the hardcover edition
How.
Dropshippers trying to profit out of his popularity/infamy.
just remembered why I created an account here:
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jobs/hwWsGdU-vibe-coder-ai-engineer
become a vibe coder for a debt collection startup! but only if youāre willing to pull 15+ hour days for 80k a year
And daily releases! AKA eternal drowning in non-functional slop code. But not to worry, onboarding consists of making the collection calls yourself, so no big deal that it doesnāt work.
Bill Gates is having a normal one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html
Bill Gates, a man who is not needed for most things, suffers from projection.
If only it were him that suffered from his projections and not everyone else.
Too true
In other news, the Open Source Intiativeās publicly bristled against the EUās attempt to regulate AI, to the point of weakening said attempts.
Tante, unsurprisingly, is not particularly impressed:
Thank you OSI. To protect the purity of your license ā which I do not consider to be open source ā you are working towards making it harder for regulators to enforce certain standards within the usage of so-called āAIā systems. Quick question: Who are you actually working for? (I know, it is corporations)
The whole Open Source/Free Software movement has run its course and has been very successful for business. But it feels like somewhere along the line we as normal human beings have been left behind.
You want my opinion, this is a major own-goal for the FOSS movement - sure, the OSI may have been technically correct where the EUās demands conflicted with the Open Source Definition, but neutering EU regs like this means any harms caused by open-source AI will be done in FOSSās name.
Considering FOSSās complete failure to fight corporate encirclement of their shit, this isnāt particularly surprising.
deleted by creator
Yud was right - we should bomb the shit out of AI servers!
Not to prevent a superintelligent AI from becoming sentient and killing us all, but because this shit should not be allowed to fucking exist
EDIT: For context, this was reacting to Erikson showing me AI-generated Ghibli memes.
I decided to remove that comment because of the risk of psychic damage.
was it the white house ICE one. I was thinking of posting that but itās so vile that I wavered
It was a compilation of random Ghibli memes an AI bro had compiled.
LW discourages LLM content, unless the LLM is AGI:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXujJjnmP85u8eM6B/policy-for-llm-writing-on-lesswrong
As a special exception, if you are an AI agent, you have information that is not widely known, and you have a thought-through belief that publishing that information will substantially increase the probability of a good future for humanity, you can submit it on LessWrong even if you donāt have a human collaborator and even if someone would prefer that it be kept secret.
Never change LW, never change.
Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).
Can post only if you look like this
(from the comments).
It felt odd to read that and think āthis isnāt directed toward me, I could skip if I wanted toā. Like I donāt know how to articulate the feeling, but itās an odd āwoah text-not-for-humans is going to become more common isnāt itā. Just feels strange to be left behind.
Yeah, euh, congrats in realizing something that a lot of people already know for a long time now. Not only is there text specifically generated to try and poison LLM results (see the whole āturns out a lot of pro russian disinformation now is in LLMs because they spammed the internet to poison LLMsā story, but also reply bots for SEO google spamming). Welcome to the 2010s LW. The paperclip maximizers are already here.
The only reason this felt weird to them is because they look at the whole ācoming AGI godā idea with some quasi-religious awe.
theyāre never going to let it go, are they? it doesnāt matter how long they spend receiving zero utility or signs of intelligence from their billion dollar ouji boards
Donāt think they can, looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted. Donāt think that is going to be psychologically healthy as a realization, it will be like the people who suddenly realize Qanon is a lie and they alienated everybody in their lives because they got tricked.
looking at the history of AI, if it fails there will be another AI winter, and considering the bubble the next winter will be an Ice Age. No minduploads for anybody, the dead stay dead, and all time is wasted.
Adding insult to injury, theyād likely also have to contend with the fact that much of the harm this AI bubble caused was the direct consequence of their dumbshit attempts to prevent an AI Apocalypsetm
As for the upcoming AI winter, Iām predicting weāre gonna see the death of AI as a concept once it starts. With LLMs and Gen-AI thoroughly redefining how the public thinks and feels about AI (near-universally for the worse), I suspect the publicās gonna come to view humanlike intelligence/creativity as something unachievable by artificial means, and I expect future attempts at creating AI to face ridicule at best and active hostility at worst.
Taking a shot in the dark, I suspect weāll see active attempts to drop the banhammer on AI as well, though admittedly my only reason is a random BlueSky post openly calling for LLMs to be banned.
Locker Weenies
From the comments
But Iām wondering if it could be expanded to allow AIs to post if their post will benefit the greater good, or benefit others, or benefit the overall utility, or benefit the world, or something like that.
No biggie, just decide one of the largest open questions in ethics and use that to moderate.
(It would be funny if unaligned AIs take advantage of this to plot humanityās downfall on LW, surrounded by flustered rats going all ātechcnially theyāre not breaking the rulesā. Especially if the dissenters are zapped from orbit 5s after posting. A supercharged Nazi bar, if you will)
I wrote down some theorems and looked at them through a microscope and actually discovered the objectively correct solution to ethics. I wonāt tell you what it is because science should be kept secret (and I could prove it but shouldnāt and wonāt).
Reminds me of the stories of how Soviet peasants during the rapid industrialization drive under Stalin, whoād never before seen any machinery in their lives, would get emotional with and try to coax faulty machines like they were their farm animals. But these were Soviet peasants! What are structural forces stopping Yud & co outgrowing their childish mystifications? Deeply misplaced religious needs?
Unlike in the paragraph above, though, most LW posters held plenty of nuts in their hands before.
ā¦ Iāll see myself out
I feel like cult orthodoxy probably accounts for most of it. The fact that they put serious thought into how to handle a sentient AI wanting to post on their forums does also suggest that theyāre taking the AGI āpossibilityā far more seriously than any of the companies that are using it to fill out marketing copy and bad news cycles. I for one find this deeply sad.
Edit to expand: if it wasnāt actively lighting the world on fire I would think thereās something perversely admirable about trying to make sure the angels dancing on the head of a pin have civil rights. As it is theyāre close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.
As it is theyāre close enough to actual power and influence that their enabling the stripping of rights and dignity from actual human people instead of staying in their little bubble of sci-fi and philosophy nerds.
This is consistent if you believe rights are contingent on achieving an integer score on some bullshit test.
AGI
Instructions unclear, LLMs now posting Texas A&M propaganda.
When Netflix inevitably makes a true-crime Ziz movie, they should give her a 69 Dodge Charger and call it The Dukes of InfoHazard
Nah, to keep with the times it should be a matte black Tesla Model 3 with the sith empire insignia on top and a horn that plays the imperial march.
Your idea is better. This perfectly captures the mood.
The only throwback thing I insist on is window entry. For historical reasons.
Considering Teslaās well-documented issues with functional door handles, this may be more accurate than you think
Why make a true crime movie when you can do a heavily editorialized ādocumentaryā for a fraction of the price.
practical downside: too easily seen as a mockumentary
