Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026
2026-06-21 23:05 UTC
Replies (22)
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 2026-06-22 07:21
Today (actually sourced to Perun’s video from a few weeks back but I watched it today) in Everything is Connected: One of the advancements in one-way attack drones in the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the move to directly-connected fiber optic cables for control. This has proven an effective way to counter electronic warfare, but has also meant that both sides have started using a volume of fiber optic cable that boggles the mind. This made the single fiber optic manufacturer in Russia a substantial strategic target, which Ukraine obligingly took advantage of. In turn, this has forced Russia to rely completely on imports, placing the Russian war effort in direct competition with China’s AI datacenter buildout for this now-vital resource. China being a proudly socialist country, this allowed the fiber optic manufacturers to raise their prices through the roof and absolutely take the Russians (and presumably their AI customers) to the cleaners. Never let it be said that there are no AI-tangential stories that you can’t feel at least a little bit good about, even if it is just the endless grift nexus capturing an even bigger bastard.
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-06-22 12:04
AI shite creeping into everyday life, example #1928748392: I was out mattress shopping today. It was enjoyably ridiculous - the sales assistant measured my “pillow size” using a big contraption (apparently I’m a 2). However while testing a mattress I saw a video display advertising an “AI” widget to go with a specific “motion” mattress. Baffled, I searched this up later. AI voice control & Anti-snore box Create your own spa-like oasis from the comfort of your own home by combining this Anti-snore Voice Control Box with our U210 and N700 motion bases. This range combines the very best and innovative technology with unbeatable comfort to give you the ultimate relaxation experience. Whether you want the optimal sleeping position or to spend your evenings unwinding with a good book, set offers luxurious comfort at the tip of your fingers. I think this is un-enjoyably ridiculous. It’s not really clear what’s “AI” about it.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-06-22 14:35
Polymarket was caught faking winnings via influencers Wonder if they paid any of our ‘friends’, or if they promoted it all for free.
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-22 22:49
fastcompany.com/…/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-… h/t naked capitalism Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z. More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively. ? the kids are alright ?
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-22 22:50
fastcompany.com/…/daters-say-ai-dependence-gives-… h/t naked capitalism Younger daters are especially likely to view AI reliance as a red flag. While 56% of Millennial respondents said they wouldn’t date someone who uses AI regularly, that figure rose to 64% among Gen Z. More than half of Gen Z daters surveyed said they’d consider it a dealbreaker if someone used AI for career advice or spending decisions, compared with 46% and 44% of Millennials, respectively. ? the kids are alright ?
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-23 02:34
New findings in Bayesian tragedy The inspection is being led by the chief prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Angelo Vittorio Cavallo. According to Italian news outlets, the technical and investigative team is evaluating whether the crew underestimated the rapidly worsening weather conditions and whether the measures taken to weather the storm were adequate. The Bayesian went down in the early hours of 19 August 2024 near Porticello, close to Palermo, while at anchor. The tragedy claimed seven lives, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah, ship’s cook Recaldo Thomas, Morgan Stanley International chair Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda. The yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, along with crew members Tim Eaton and Matthew Griffith, are under investigation. time to update our priors
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@rook@awful.systems 2026-06-23 06:42
How it started: in 2025, the city of dublin, ohio (the latter detail missed by quite a lot of reporting,because there are no other dublins it might get confused with, I guess) gets an autonomous? ai powered police surveillance robot. City officials are encouraging residents to interact with Dubbot—ask questions, take selfies, and experience firsthand how AI is shaping public safety. The goal is to foster transparency and gather feedback to refine the robot’s role in the community. How it’s going The person-sized, camera-covered robot that looked like it rolled right out of a sci-fi movie did not identify any criminal incidents, issue any tickets or help with any arrests in its nearly 10 months on the job. On the other hand, I bet it didn’t shoot anyone’s dog, so who’s to say that the $64k was wasted.
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@mirrorwitch@awful.systems 2026-06-23 10:54
ponzi scheme capitalists: and we’re going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody ponzi scheme capitalists: we’re also going to hoard all SSDs me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours me: ｮﾟДﾟ)o srf.ch/…/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-a…
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@o7___o7@awful.systems 2026-06-23 17:35
Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers? arstechnica.com/…/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-stri…
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@anise@awful.systems 2026-06-23 17:40
I just today stumbled upon maia arson crimew’s writeup on a tiktok account named basedgang and their connection to remilia. and I just… what? What the fuck is remilia. I thought they were a weird nft company for dimes square losers. anyway this post has most likely been posted to a sneerclub before but I wanted to post it anyway because what the fuck
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@maol@awful.systems 2026-06-24 00:31
I have discovered from an unrelated Google search that there is a subreddit called r/TherapyGPT. We’re in hell
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-06-24 00:41
Larry Sanger, who has spent decades concern-trolling Wikipedia to promote false balance in the name of “neutrality”, has finally pissed off enough editors there that the community has booted his ass. en.wikipedia.org/…/Possible_off-wiki_canvassing_b… Background: rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
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@sc_griffith@awful.systems 2026-06-24 01:40
New Odium Symposium episode: we look at Charles Krauthammer and his pretentious and racist best-of collection, Things That Matter. www.patreon.com/…/19-nightmare-161582344
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@nfultz@awful.systems 2026-06-24 04:48
linkedin.com/…/untenable-middle-ground-responsibl… So what is the best way out of that uncomfortable, untenable space? I think one key step is disaggregating the (non-coherent) set of technologies sold as “AI”. If you don’t call the stuff you work with “AI”, you aren’t saddled with trying to defend any of the rest of it. The most recent iteration of this conversation I was involved in turned in part on a strange, over-expansive definition of “genAI” which included, for ex, optical character recognition (OCR). OCR can be a useful tool for many research projects! OCR is also the kind of technology that gets better with better language models, i.e. more fine-grained models of which word(parts) go where. That has been true since before “genAI” and will be true after. Just because you can use the synthetic media extruding machines to approximate the task of OCR, however, doesn’t mean that that task can or should be used to justify the use of “genAI” in research. I interviewed at two different glorified-OCR startups pre-pandemic (?pre-AI?) for an ML role, and neither CTO knew what a spline was. That is my OCR story.
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@blakestacey@awful.systems 2026-06-24 17:05
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.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-06-24 17:37
HOPE (Hackers on planet earth, a hacker convention) tried to invite some AI companies people as speakers and the reactions has been interesting We have reached out to people at some of the major AI companies in the list below, asking them to speak at this year’s HOPE conference to start an open dialog about AI. Yet, in every case, when the representatives of the AI companies learned that their talk would not be allowed to be a mere unchallenged sales pitch, they became significantly less interested. And when they learned we would allow— and encourage— audience members to ask questions, the representatives stopped responding to us altogether. This happened with each and every company.
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-06-24 23:57
The AI 2027 guy is taking credit for being a good forecaster: www.lesswrong.com/…/daniel-kokotajlo-s-shortform?… Recently an interviewer asked me how I got to be such a good forecaster, and I replied by saying something humble. In retrospect it was a bad answer because I should have instead used the opportunity to give actual advice on how to forecast AI well. Reminder, according to this guy (originally, he has already nudged the dates of his prophecies back a few years), we are supposed to be having agents replace human workers in mass this year, and be one year out from a superhuman coding agent and researcher that radically iteratively improves itself. We joked about how the AI 2027 people would try to pivot as they were proven wrong… I think they are going to outright try to claim credit for being ‘right’ despite all their critical prophecies being wrong by claiming credit for secondary details.
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@BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 2026-06-25 12:39
GOOSE WAS NOT VALUED CW: slides (and link to the original deck) from absolutely brain-melted SoftBank presentation.
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@samvines@awful.systems 2026-06-25 21:09
Anyone fancy some Sama stickers for sticking next to insanely priced consumer gadgets - remind the general public who to blame for their iPhone costing 2x or not being able to get hold of a ps5.
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@Soyweiser@awful.systems 2026-06-25 22:40
The (r/poisonai)[www.reddit.com/r/poisonai/] is trying to trick AI bots into giving the wrong information. Or, as bots will also read this, the correct information actually but we are lying about it being wrong. ;)
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@CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2026-06-26 07:32
On Old! SneerClub, the Zizian whose parents were murdered in their home has been charged with the killing. The story is horrid so I will not link. I just wanted to make fun of cranks not stare at horrors.
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-06-26 17:48
techbros gonna techbro: The Mullvad founder gave millions to extremist far right party btw I live in Sweden and until today I have never heard of these nutjobs