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 April Fool’s in advance.)
a good vibe coding sneer found in the wild
AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?
Published in Science… Advances
Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I’m missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn’t appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.
Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/
“We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off.”
This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off
Holy smokes
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 He is a Nazi with lots of cash.
there was a reddit ama with an ukrainian dude who was in charge of procurement of certain drones for ukrainian army. among these were uavs from anduril, and uaf decided not to buy them, chiefly because these drones don’t work and cost something like 20-50x more than equivalent ukrainian designs that do work. the reason why they don’t work is russian jamming, about which anduril people presumably were informed, yet somehow they still were complete assholes (to foreigners only) through entire process. which also means that ukrainian elint captured how russian jamming works, gave that data to anduril who proceeded to do fuck all with it, possibly leaking this intel in some signal chat
the reason why these were on the table to begin with is that (part of) american weapons aid is provided in form of money to be spent at american manufacturers, it’s not pallets of cash like fox news would like you to believe. (private donations to places like united24 do work this way, but also for example denmark does provide money with no strings attached, at least not these). (yea i’m effectiving my weaponized altruism, cranking up these numbers of dead russians per thousand euros). reasons for that are slight wage discrepancy between poltava and berkeley, compounded by scale (how many drones does anduril make per year, 20? ukrainians make low millions, probably with thousands to hundreds of thousands per type). most of costs in drone development is driven by software. doesn’t help that thiel’s people are swamped in vc money, therefore they don’t have to work efficiently, neither have their drones, or even they don’t need to work at all. ukrainians don’t have the luxury to blow millions into ai swarming that doesn’t work and instead put that effort into signal processing to avoid jamming, which does work, which they can check pretty quickly too.
this is the disruption they’re cooking. invest in eastern europe or something
@sailor_sega_saturn getting this in now: “I never thought *my* hed would get cut off,” sobs CEO of Cuttin’ Off Heds, Inc.
@bitofhope Indeed.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 This has always been how he, and Palantir, think about the world. It’s a terrible company, full of terrible people, selling horrifying products to terrible countries and companies.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
Better them than us.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Peter Thiel could be one of those who are going to lose their head in that revolution…
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 At least one of the DOGE team has a recent criminal past, which should, in a sensible world, bar him from accessing such data: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-graduated-from-the-com/
@sailor_sega_saturn I hate how these death cult douchebros appropriate Tolkien to name their companies selling fascism in bulk to the government.
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 we should make sure he is at the head of the line…
@hub @sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 Is it too early for head jokes?
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984
I hear that the rich and powerful are concerned about guillotine and that makes me feel happy. They should fear us.
@sailor_sega_saturn Yeah, let’s start right with those who say such things!
@sailor_sega_saturn @BlueMonday1984 he’s not wrong about that
What if America built a Death Star, but it was 50% exhaust ports by surface area?
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/how-the-eu-could-target-us-big-tech-with-its-tariff-response.html
with a whole 2 Ts!
taking bets on whether that’s 2 terminators or whether it’s the amount of USD they want to burn to make it into a machine god
Llama 4 Maverick offers a best-in-class performance to cost ratio with an experimental chat version scoring ELO of 1417 on LMArena.
Everything on that page is silly nonsense, but this takes the cake. An Elo rating for chitchat!!!
