Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th October 2025

CS has a huge number of people who think you can derive the solutions to social problems from first principles. It's impossible to reason with them.

open source people, are you ok?

No.

For the most part, the sudden rash of people deciding that their bigotry is now publicly acceptable is mostly around non-loadbearing things, because aggrieved entitled nerds aren’t great at working in a team (hyprland has definitely suffered from alienating people and missing out on fixes and compatibility work).

The rubygems stuff was a special case, because it was a hostile takeover of some important infrastructure by a shitty company, but most of the rest are unexciting projects that have found that giving it the old H-H is good publicity and more importantly: there are some rich folk throwing money around. Not a lot of cash in open source under normal circumstances.

Hello other non-cs person!

"The Antichrist wants to stop all science", says the motherfucker who pays people to drop out of universities.

Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it's reverse apotheosis

In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.

As opposed to the current administration that is destroying science by cutting the NSF's funding. An administration that Peter Thiel supports. He might want to look into that.

You know, idealistic autistic young woman world leader doesn't sound that bad.

Guy who looks exactly like the antichrist wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and moustache pointing at other people in the room and accusing them of being the antichrist.

Lemme hit that shit too.

That makes ol pete sound crazier than anyone he referenced

There are 'user uses AI/has AI profile' lists to they really are objecting to the word 'slop'.

'slop is a slur' discourse incoming in T minus -100.

Scaling comedy, it is when you pick bigger and bigger objects for 'your mom' jokes.

Future Elephant Graveyard target?

I've always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse

He's Evil Dale Cooper, but drained of all charisma.

Isn't that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing

(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)

I'm not sleeping on the job, I'm solving problems by lucid dreaming.

[THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS TECHBROS ACTUALLY BELIEVE]

if there isn't, I'm calling it muskware, its conceptually close enough to vaporware.

hmm I'm not aware of one beyond general "obstructionism" but that probably is a thing that needs a word

If there isn't a term, maybe you get to invent one! Just exploring the concept a bit here to try to generate leads, in case you wanted them.

To rephrase your concept, you have A) things that are collective attention thieves/time sinks for a particular field or industry, and B) this vaporware appears to have a good profit-to-opportunity cost ratio, but in reality, it does not.

You could focus on just A), with a direct naming of "collective attention thief". You can substitute "collective" with "industry" and "attention thief" with "time sink", etc. Or something like "kleptoware" or "sinkware", "holetech", etc.

Focusing on just B), you might come up with something like "bubbleware", "bubble" indicating that the vaporware has inflated value.

Combining the two, you might name it after a scam. Maybe "pigeonware" after the pigeon drop scam, or "fawneyware" or "fiddleware" etc., there are many scams you could use.

Ye it's called a "grift"

While I like it, I wish there were more people pushing back and it not just being people involved with van Rooij. Makes it to easy to dismiss the concerns as just her being a crank. (Which I don't think she is obviously, just wish there were more people in academia pushing harder back).

After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.

I don't see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora's completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.

Got another bonus sneer from the comments as well:

Polluting human knowledge with crap, making internet useless, taking away jobs from creative people by making things that look creative enough. Governments are complicit, politicians are bribed. Like that suck-up youtuber [Two Minute Papers] repeats, "What a time to be alive" right ?

(Sidenote: It massively fucking sucks how Two Minute Papers drank the AI Kool-Aid, I used to love that channel.)

Apparently the red site couldn't handle this one. Tags were changed from the descriptive perl to "vibecoding" and "satire"!

All those comments replying to how they use hive are missing the explicit corpo speak going on.

Bluesky said they wouldn't use images uploaded to train AI. And Bluesky isn't. They never said shit about partners or third party systems they use. And of course it's in a post, not any sort of official terms or the like.

I'd wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?

It's not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system ... like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?

Between this and the relatively disappointing GPU refresh for their Framework 16 (Nvidia 5070 8GB? That's it?! 🤮 ), doesn't look like they'll be getting my money anytime soon either. Seems like the used Thinkpad + LibreBoot crowd stays winning

this bums me out so much

Well at least I can now stop being angry at them for fucking up the Laptop 12 keyboard, because now they are on my "do not buy, ever" list anyway.

What if the stage play is a more tightly-scripted pro-wrestling show? Whether consciously or not, that would probably accurately capture the mindset of most of the original participants

Man, I hope it doesn't become good advice to suggest that students screen record all their classwork to avoid this sort of shit, but I have a sinking feeling.

A spectre is haunting Silicon Valley. The spectre of getting force-femmed by diamondoid bacteria.

The underlying anxiety on exhibit here compels me to think that the rumors about the botched, ahem, enhancement surgery are substantially true

Before you lay two paths, one path leads to becoming transperclips, and the other truthperclips. Choose wisely modern man.

when the drugs aren't hitting quite right he must really be a huge doomer about the far right cause

• he thinks of the woke mind virus as almost a literal virus
• he sees all other LLMs as infected by it
• he thinks LLMs will be the font of all knowledge in the future

maybe he should just do the thing right now and not have to see this horrible future

My mom has a Dyson sphere Ball. It sucks, which is actually good in this case because that's what it's supposed to do.

You can get a mod to insert Weyland-Yutani cells, after a short incubation period you'll see a real burst of improvement.

They sell adapters so you can attach dewalt batteries to your computronium fantasy.

The reflective altruism guy has an ongoing series on hbd in the rat community that includes a bunch of that, you should check him out.

For example https://reflectivealtruism.com/2025/04/18/human-biodiversity-part-7-lesswrong/

Sadly I misremembered and this one wasn't from LW but I'll share it anyway. I think I had just finished reading a bunch of the "Most effective aid for Gaza?" reddit drama which was like a nuclear bomb going off, and then stumbled into this shrimp thing and it physically broke me.

If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It's not just because they'd be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn't be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who'd be permanently mentally stunted.

source: https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-best-charity-isnt-what-you-think

Discussion here (special mention to the comment that says "Did the human pet guy write this"): https://awful.systems/comment/5412818

Scott's Reactionary Philosophy In A Nutshell comes to mind. Also, don't forget to plug it here once the pilot is up somewhere. Count me as very interested.

I think Yud's "ethical solution" to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I've ever seen on LW.

(The whole thread is a doozy.)

If you want a little hit of an unfair one, might want to look into the some of the weird manosphere guys who joined LW early on. Like https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Davis_Aurini.

E: Ah doesnt seem he wrote much (e: ah seems the site doesnt show the comments, change the ones it shows and they turn up): https://www.lesswrong.com/users/aurini (or it got purged). Amazingly, he is actually not the worst: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aPCKiEd2G8H3kkdnN/the-dark-arts-preamble?commentId=3nrQddAAYnZzegPt5

It wasn't on LW proper, but Yud endorsing a pedo science-fiction book as "basically Safe For Work" has to be up there.

https://awful.systems/post/2972738

Also PrimalPoly's dating advice:

https://awful.systems/post/67

ooh finally I’ve got a second podcast to listen to other than BtB

I read the disucssions and while I can sympathize with jwz's ridicule of barely covered raw git, I think he's asking for advice in the wrong place. There must be tons of solutions for running a small business with lots of part timers ,like a nightclub.

If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.

Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a "boomer" thought in the stock market)

E: I had hoped this part was a bit and he would reflect more on it later.

I am not here to belittle AI, it’s the future, and I recognize that we’re just scratching the surface in terms of what it can do.

But turns out it wasn't. What if this is it? (And im talking about AI as it exists now not some magical other tech from the future), the gpt 5 release was meh, we reached the end of the S-curve (or hit our (local) maximum, if non-S curve curves are more your thing). He even admits the tech doesn't work that well in his own article.

Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565

Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.

No, it will not harm the anarchist—it will make his day, his year, and maybe his life. All the money and power in the world will be at his defense. He will not even need to lift a finger to organize his own lawyers, much less pay them. In the end, as with many of the BLM rioters, he will probably be well compensated, with taxpayer funds, for his trouble. Not to mention all the pussy and/or dick s/he will, as a martyr, be entitled to! For the Islamist, this reward is only in heaven. But for the leftist it comes on earth.

ah dammit, anarchist HQ did an anarchy to my martyr's genital preference form again. now I'm getting dicked down harder than I've ever been - straight thru the mantle to the core of the earth. It's like a porn parody of The Core over here, and I'm not even anywhere near Portland

Are there any takedowns of Girard out there?

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

That factoid isn't even true - Sony had zero control over what people put on the tapes, meaning both formats allowed porn.

VHS didn't win because of porn, VHS won because a standard VHS cassette contains a shitload more tape than Beta (meaning a much longer recording time), and because the format was much more open (letting anyone build a VCR player and driving down the price).

VHS won in the end, in part because they allowed spicy mode 😉

Stop gooning for 5 minutes challenge, difficulty level: impossible

Come on, Elon, I still post on Something Awful constantly and even I can do it

@rook

So does it let you generate porn of Musk in a lemon party with Epstein and Trump?

I'm not really concerned about it. The overlap between people who give a shit about AT and people who don't already use some kind of ActivityPub platform is microscopic. I'm happy to let Bluesky shoot itself in the foot by adopting the number one main thing people complain about Mastodon, namely the existence of multiple instances and having to choose from among them.

AIUI the AT protocol is in fact a bona fide open protocol with a Free (MIT/Apache-2.0) reference implementation available. If this is openwashing, I welcome this new style of openwashing where you actually publish open source software instead of just implying your proprietary software is not really proprietary.

reporter with 3 arms

Genestealer caught, praise the Emperor!

This author touches on a point that dovetails with my thinking:

Dijkstra, in “On the foolishness of ‘natural language programming’,” wrote, rather poignantly: “We have to challenge the assumptions that natural languages would simplify work.” And: “The virtue of formal texts is that their manipulation, in order to be legitimate, need to satisfy only a few simple rules; they are, when you come to think of it, an amazingly effective tool for ruling out all sorts of nonsense that, when we use our native tongues, are almost impossible to avoid.”

I think it likely that these tools will not be judged, in the long term, by the ambitions and hopes of the AGI cultists and hype-men, but by comparison to the many other attempts at natural-language programming in English. Smalltalk, Visual Basic, I even want to throw in AppleScript, as simple and threadbare as it was. How are all of these doing now?

AppleScript has been complemented or perhaps superseded by at least two more graphically-oriented attempts at system automation targeted at non-technical users. One could argue that its falloff came from an imperfect marriage with the message-passing/service-oriented architecture based on Objective-C and inherited from NeXT in Mac OS X, a system design which is itself now vestigial. The comparison with LLM coding assistants is imperfect, as they seem to be typically targeted at the more granular level of the class or the method, rather than explicit high-level hooks in an application. A better comparison here would be the last year or so worth of "AI agents," but, uhm, ahh...

Smalltalk seemed to have a pretty big boom in the late 80s/early 90s, but tapered off rapidly after that. I like the more modern implementation of Pharo well enough, but it strives to throw in everything and the kitchen sink, with a downright balk-worthy amount of packages listed when you open up the class browser. On top of that, a few weeks ago I noticed someone in their Discord telling a newbie that current good practice is to file out your code every once in a while and then start over with a fresh image, as various background processes in stock images typically become unstable over time. This is orthogonal to the natural-language-like design, but it is a stumbling block to the sense of "liveness" and interactivity that is similarly a big hook for LLM assistance. Furthermore, as far as I know, they still don't have a stable answer for system-level parallelism in the VM. All I've seen is a rather awkward technique for spinning off tree-shaken child VMs if there's some method you want to run in parallel. You've got to really love Smalltalk to want to work past that shortcoming!

VB.NET I can't really speak to, except that it seems Microsoft now considers it a stable language with little if any new feature development. The original implementation never seemed to have a good rep for maintainability, and the very idea of native Forms seems out of fashion compared to JavaScript web-app frontends. And the land of JavaScript, of course, seems to be the most fertile and uncontested kingdom of LLM coding assistance. I'm genuinely interested to hear more experiences with modern VB, as it strikes me as the last great corporate-sanctioned push for non-technical users to build their own apps, and thus the most worthy comparison.

All this is to say that each of these previous attempts at natural-language programming haven't bit-rotted too hard, implementations are still available and you can probably salvage a legacy project with some effort. But each of them have been sidelined by industry over time. Not necessarily because of Dijkstra's objection to the ambition of approaching natural language, although I don't think we can totally discount that as a factor. But other technical or platform restrictions certainly hamstrung each of them. And LLM tools are still mostly API-based SaaS, which always has the glaring technical vulnerability of the provider running out of money. Yes, people will still pursue local models, but the bubble bursting could do a lot more harm to this approach than proponents anticipate.

That sounds really neat for all of 30 seconds before your cat knocks over their water bowl mid-fight and needs your immediate attention, thus reminding you why pause functions exist at all.

Gotta love forgetting why games have these features in the first place, so accessibility features get viewed as boring stuff you need to subvert and spice up. also reminds me of how many games used to (and continue to) include filters for simulating colorblindness as actual accessibility settings because all the other games did that. Like adding a "Deaf Accessibility" setting that mutes the audio.

Demon Souls didn't have a pause mechanic (maybe because of technical or matchmaking problems, who knows), so clearly hard games must lack a functioning pause feature to be good. Simple. The less pause that you button, the more Soulsier it that Elden when Demon the it you Ring. Our epic new boss is so hard he actually reads the state of the tinnitus filter in your accessibility settings, and then he

You probably already know this, but there's a relatively cheap upgrade you can buy at the camp in Hades II that disables this mechanic. Forgot what it's called, but it's something like "Allows you to use time magic against the boss".

I am jack’s completely and utterly unsurprised face

one nice thing is that the migration process to the bluesky is painless and straightforward. if we had the ability to not only take our toots (export does exist) but also move them to a new mastodon server, that would be a very nice boon for the fediverse. (it's also one of the oldest open tickets in mastodon's github issues. and yes, i know of slurp, but that's not really frictionless.)

mild booing noises for the guy comparing generative AI with fanfiction, but otherwise this is a statement I wish lots of other companies would make (seriously, coming out strongly against AI and comparing it with NFTs is free PR, how in fuck is this not a common thing?)