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blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
7
Comments
677
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026

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  • Thanks! All I'm really hoping for is that it'll be fun.

    Edit to add: I just ran the stats on my redux.txt file, and my word count since Thursday is over 9000.

    :-P

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026

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  • Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction murder mystery novel. One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense. I've been spending the past few days planning how to rip out that whole notion and replace it with a subplot about a different scientific discovery. I've been writing scenes to get back the old character voices and figure out how they might have changed, and to sketch new fictional science based on the actual science I've learned since my first go-around. This is after several weeks of binge-writing fanfiction, which I wholly endorse as a recreational activity. I don't know if I'm a better writer, but I'm definitely one who has written more words.

    So, that might be keeping me busy. Of course, I'll still be around to ban people who deserve it and to cruelly mock them in the process.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026

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  • Even supposing the technology worked as advertised—and that's very much a supposition arguendo, one that flies in the face of the facts—it's hard for me to think of any mathematical discovery that would be worth the cost of the AI industry. How many people in Memphis would I give respiratory cancer in order to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Zero, you absolute fuckers.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026

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  • I distinctly remember being told that AI would help mathematics by providing a better way to search the literature.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026

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  • If the math teachers start making rap songs about this jargon, and if enough youth pastors emulate it while sitting backward in enough chairs, we might yet kill it dead.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026

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  • I'm trying a new thing where I replace "AI" with "the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg's Naked Lunch movie".

    I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!

    Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don't have to stick with the default!

  • Let’s palm off humanoid robot teachers onto the poor kids!

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  • It sucks and I hate it, and I applaud the locals who rallied together to yell at that superintendent until he finally paused the implementation of this thing. This shit is not inevitable, and if one of these dolls does ever end up in a poor, underserved high school, I hope it’s one that’s a lot like the one where I went to school because it would be a smoldering pile of silicone in the corner of the girls’ room by the end of the first week.

    https://skepchick.org/2026/07/i-hate-the-ai-robo-teacher/

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026

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  • Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:

    This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the "Effective Altruism" propaganda network.

    Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026

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  • Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome

    Yeah, but that's just the cocaine

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history of... performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweil's singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Barbara Rosenblat's recordings of the Amelia Peabody novels are fun.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • Some of us figured it out after writing two novels with gender-flipped self-portraits as main characters, just as god intended

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • In local Boston-area sneering:

    This is the map that City Councilors Miniard Culpepper (Roxbury) and Brian Worrell (Dorchester) used yesterday as part of their case to build an Orange Line extension down Blue Hill Avenue. As if we needed more proof that friends don't let friends use generative AI. How many mistakes can you find?

    "Arlington Heights" has materialized on the Commuter Rail line I took every day to Brandeis, North Station is no longer on the Green Line, Government Center is now the second Park Street, backup copies of State and DTX have appeared for good measure, Boylston and Arlington have departed for the realm of the A branch, along with the Braintree branch of the Red Line... I never knew the "what's wrong with this picture" puzzles in the Sunday funnies would be such good training for evaluating computer technology.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • Do we have to believe gamblers who say they've got a "system"?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • If you switch to a new kind of tainted beef, that's updating your prions

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Random Positivity Thread: Happy Food Memories

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Coordinating a post-Calibre path forward

    wandering.shop /@xgranade/115680412493693277
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systems

    awful.systems /post/5699944
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

    awful.systems /post/4885338
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23 February 2025

    awful.systems /post/3491424
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    blakestacey @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems

    awful.systems /post/3278715