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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025

awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025 - awful.systems

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. Also, happy Pride :3)

115 comments

  • This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining

    https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068

    https://archive.is/cKxyV

    David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.

    Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.

    L. O. L.

  • Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:

    https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz

    (reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)

    OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.

    OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.

  • Has anyone heard of Boom Supersonic? Supposedly the company is making a new SST that is supposed to be able to go supersonic without the sonic boom hitting the ground by flying at or above 50,000 feet. They did a demo flight using a a plane that doesn't use the engine tech that the prospective finished plane will have nor does it resemble the prospective airframe design, so it seems like they went fast to prove fast plane is fast I guess?

    • I just now heard about here. Reading about it on Wikipedia... they had a mathematical model that said their design shouldn't generate a sonic boom audible from ground level, but it was possible their mathematical model wasn't completely correct, so building a 1/3 scale prototype (apparently) validated their model? It's possible their model won't be right about their prospective design, but if it was right about the 1/3 scale then that is good evidence their model will be right? idk, I'm not seeing much that is sneerable here, it seems kind of neat. Surely they wouldn't spend the money on the 1/3 scale prototype unless they actually needed the data (as opposed to it being a marketing ploy or worse yet a ploy for more VC funds)... surely they wouldn't?

      iirc about the Concorde (one of only two supersonic passenger planes), it isn't so much that supersonic passenger planes aren't technologically viable, its more a question of economics (with some additional issues with noise pollution and other environmental issues). Limits on their flight path because of the sonic booms was one of the problems with the Concorde, so at least they won't have that problem. And as to the other questions... Boom Supersonic's webpage directly addresses these questions, but not in any detail, but at least they address them...

      Looking for some more skeptical sources... this website seems interesting: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-boom-successfully-build-a-supersonic . They point out some big problems with Boom's approach. Boom is designing both its own engine and it's own plane, and the costs are likely to run into the limits of their VC funding even assuming nothing goes wrong. And even if they get a working plane and engine, the safety, cost, and reliability needed for a viable supersonic passenger plane might not be met. And... XB-1 didn't actually reach Mach 2.2 and was retired after only a few flight. Maybe it was a desperate ploy for more VC funding? Or maybe it had some unannounced issues? Okay... I'm seeing why this is potentially sneerable. There is a decent chance they entirely fail to deliver a plane with the VC funding they have, and even if they get that far it is likely to fail as a commercially viable passenger plane. Still, there is some possibility they deliver something... so eh, wait and see?

  • I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

    Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

    It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

  • Off topic: really enjoying Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast at the moment. Listened to the French Revolution and am now in the midst of the July Revolution.

  • Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'

    Link to interview: (variety) (archive)

    relevant section from interview:

    As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.

    “It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.

    When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.

    “It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”

    “I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”

    She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”

    • I mean I don't doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I've got a lot of love for Rian Johnson's work and don't have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it's artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn't stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don't have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn't something I'd wish on anyone, but it's still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it's not just that AI art is bad - we've seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it's replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don't think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you're paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn't have created the torment nexus, you're still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.

115 comments