Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
LWer draws dumb conclusions from a single observation, and Gwern of all people whale on them:
“Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point” etc.
Wait, the argument is partially women being childless are driven insane? Good to see the return of kings authors found new work blogging for LW.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994169 As with bitcoin before it, LLM dev cycles are now tied with the phases of the moon.
I loved that argument for bitcoin. The currency dropped anywhere in oct till march? ‘traditionally it always drops around xmas/black friday/valentine/chinese nye/nye’.
Today in Seems Legit News:
“As a concrete example, an engineer at Spotify on their morning commute from Slack on their cell phone can tell Claude to fix a bug or add a new feature to the iOS app,” Söderström said. “And once Claude finishes that work, the engineer then gets a new version of the app, pushed to them on Slack on their phone, so that he can then merge it to production, all before they even arrive at the office.”
- why is engineer working before contracted time
- if engineer can do everything by cellphone why does engineer have to commute in the first place
- if Claude can do everything anyway why do you still have engineers at all
- if “no engineer has written a line of code since December”, when are your lowering your subscription prices Spotify
- why is hypothetical engineer a “he”, Spotify
- do you often merge Claude code to production without even a review, Spotify
- in unrelated news, Anna’s Archive has socialised Spotify metadata and 6TB of music, Gods bless them https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-quietly-releases-millions-of-spotify-tracks-despite-legal-pushback/
- though I won’t do anything with that as I assume everything from Spotify is “AI” “music” anyway and I listen to my bands either from bandcamp, soulseek, or just downloaded from youtube videos uploaded over 10 years ago
It’s a good day to read this announcement and then field a question by a pal why their Spotify playlist plays in reverse
Soulseek rules.
why does engineer have to commute in the first place
What, do you expect our serfs to be unsupervised at home? Preposterous.
If the engineer does not commute they will be unable, or rather un-abelian
excruciating
What they don’t tell you about opening the Lament Configuration is, after the pearl-headed nails and the sewing of wires to nerves, just how many puns are involved.
Oh for fuck’s sake
When someone says they can do this, I try to say ‘ok, well can you do it right now to show me?’ and so far the answer has always been deflection.
Never in the history of ever has a promptly finished ticket been something for a CEO to brag about, but here we are.
I guess since more down-to-earth stories like “chatgpclaudemini found the best value for money such and such for me” really aren’t happening, trying to impress people who think coding is magic is as good a fallback as any.
@mirrorwitch @BlueMonday1984 all of the above. Re point 1, see also the recent HBR article https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it
Enjoy these pics of some very British SF/F authors celebrating a book launch:
https://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2026/02/on-being-launched.html
I absolutely adore Paul McAuley’s writing, it’s some of the best there is. And it’s fun to see his peers turn up to support the launch. China Meiville looks exactly how I imagined him, as does Peter Hamilton.
Miéville
I hope people are aware of the allegations against him, and how he managed to get them all scrubbed from the internet.
Oh no not him too 😡
Yeah, but it is odd, as he managed to scrub all the accusations, which is quite rare for somebody to manage.
Unrelated to that im always reminded of how I didnt like Perdido Street Station, has a few interesting ideas and so much that doesnt work (and a very unlikeable main character).
I managed to get through Perdido and Embassytown, but not much else…
i expected alastair reynolds to look different but i’m not sure what i actually expected him to look like
A machine learning researcher points out how the field has become enshittified. Everything is about publications, beating benchmarks, and social media. LLM use in papers, LLM use in reviews, LLM use in meta-reviews. Nobody cares about the meaning of the actual research anymore.
I like this reply on Reddit:
I do my PhD in fair evaluation of ML algorithms, and I literally have enough work to go through until I die. So much mess, non-reproducible results, overfitting benchmarks, and worst of all this has become a norm. Lately, it took our team MONTHS to reproduce (or even just run) a bunch of methods to just embed inputs, not even train or finetune.
I see maybe a solution, or at least help, in closer research-business collaboration. Companies don’t care about papers really, just to get methods that work and make money. Maxing out drug design benchmark is useless if the algorithm fails to produce anything usable in real-world lab. Anecdotally, I’ve seen much better and more fair results from PhDs and PhD students that work part-time in the industry as ML engineers or applied researchers.
This can go a good way (most of the field becomes a closed circle like parapsychology) or a bad way (people assume the results are true and apply them, like the social priming or Reinhart and Rogoff’s economic paper with the Excel error).
OT: Just gave my two weeks notice and it turns out management is very big on using ChatGPT…
“Quitting your job is not just fun, it’s invigorating!”
But seriously, between the alcohol market being a complete shitshow now and overproduction of microdistilleries/breweries (the dieback is just starting here)…I think I picked a good moment to fall to pieces.
Also it was only a matter of time before we lost airpod privileges tbh.
EDIT:
I’m removing the image (keeping the original text for posterity), but I just completely got had by someone straight up lying.
It’s quite embarrasing, I should’ve been way more skeptical of someone posting an image without sourcing the original paper. Turns out not only is it not a recent paper at all (published June 2025), not only is that table not saying what he claims it’s saying, but the authors have since removed that table altogether from revised versions of the paper!
That’s what you get from reposting someone who has “The Finance Newsletter” in his fucking username, couldn’t have gone well for me.
original post
From https://bsky.app/profile/thefinancenewsletter.com/post/3mek7wsqgkk26
Microsoft released a study showing the 40 jobs most at risk by AI:
Tag the most ridiculous entry, I am curious of your choices.
To me it has to be fucking historians. Arriving at new conclusions by looking at available evidence and/or finding obscure references that are not well known to the public – CLASSIC THING LLMS ARE GOOD AT.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Lol at “historians”
“He who controls the past controls the future.” much?
(This is the run-up to that: “Who controls the present controls the past.”)
Passenger Attendants
Hosts and Hostesses
Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.
LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984
Seems like Sales Representatives for Services could go wrong in an infinite loop of stuff companies don’t want, stuff companies can’t do, stuff nobody asked for, and probably crimes against humanity.Edited the post after it came to my attention I got duped, I got had, I got bamboozled by a liar
Don’t feel bad, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid being duped in the future.
But unlike those that have fallen to hubris I am built different and should be immune to disinformation!
I remember this paper from last summer, the authors put up a followup right when school started that distances it from the AI replacement theory: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/applicability-vs-job-displacement-further-notes-on-our-recent-research-on-ai-and-occupations/
I work a lot with the underlying data set they used, ONET is really carefully designed but easy to misinterpret; and also I wanted to mention that it is produced by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which has been DOGE’d since then. Future research into jobs, AI or regular, will probably degrade as this continues.
Historians definitely stood out to me, but also data scientists. The glorified grammar auto-complete that can’t do math is expected to do statistical analysis??
Most of the routine data analysis has already been “vendorized”, AI won’t make a difference. Why run an A/B test manually when you can drop Optimizely on to your page and let it run. I mean, /I/ know why I would, but I doubt a PM would.
@V0ldek Mathematicians.
Tell me you have no idea what mathematicians do by publishing an absolute mockery of mathematics purporting to explain that mathematicians are likely to be replaced by LLMs.
Yesss, and it’s still worth playing today!
“these ai girls with 3 boobs really puts strain on the fashion model industry”
CNC Tool Programmer is a good one and shows that Microsoft, a company that probably has paid for someone to run CNC tooling for prototyping AND supposedly makes software, didn’t do the bare minimum to understand complexeties involved by talking to that someone.
Yeah, you can make mistakes with programming this thing, it’ll happily destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars in tooling as well as potentially maiming or killing anyone standing too close while the machine is actually physically crashing. It will friction-weld your nice, expensive carbide cutting tool with cooling channels to your work piece (even if they are dissimler metals) by taking too big of a cut because it does exactly as it’s instructed.
someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they’d tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
That’s not just smart, that’s capital-J Jenius.
I do believe that’s literally how the automation dystopia began in Vonnegut’s Player Piano.
some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs
I expected a willingness from HN users to backstab the working class, but I didn’t expect something this blatantly half-baked.
10x developers, 0.1x proletariat.
@V0ldek@awful.systems @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems I see how you might find historians ridiculous but have you considered… proofreaders?
@V0ldek “Farm and Home Management Educators”
WTF
@V0ldek Oh no, what will happen to the ::checks notes:: switchboard operation industry??
better read the study yourself, here https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
before you order the cavalry charge, fwiw this skeet misrepresents the actual study topic rather badly, as another bluesky commenter notes.
this doesn’t mean that the paper is any good or doesn’t deserve mockery (i don’t know, i didn’t read it yet, and i’m not sure i have apparatus to make other than esthetic judgements), just that the conclusions the og skeet author attributes to the paper aren’t the paper’s conclusions.
Thank you.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Models?! The very form that captures AI and large language?! Models?!
So AI LLMs are at risk of destroying themselves?
How poetic.
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Archivists are less at risk than historians? Quality thought went into this.
Also mathematicians - have they seen how LLMs “solve” problems.
@V0ldek @cstross I couldn’t even read the whole list after seeing “CNC Programmers” on it. That may not be the most absurd, but the idea of “here’s a robot with a sharp blade spinning at high RPM that we’re using to make a physical object with extreme precision, so we fired the human who knows how it works and gave their job to the hallucination box” makes Willy’s Chocolate Experience seem like a warmup. I just hope there’s video. Lots of video. Ideally from behind safety glass.
Production CNC machines are beyond safety glass and sheet metal already.
Sometimes even in work cell cages!Programming CNC has been done by opening up the print or CAD model and telling the CAM package to generate the tool paths for many years already.
Sometimes programmers edit the generated code a little bit to adapt it, but there’s little zero risk in trying machine models on this. The worst that can happen is a crash that scraps a $50k spindle.
@geeksam @V0ldek @cstross The original poster of this story can’t read. Somebody in the Bluesky thread found the original paper. The research looked at people in these professions using LLM assistance in their workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935“Can’t read” is the kind of insult we don’t need in this context.
@blakestacey Redundant?
Pointlessly insulting, cruel, assumes total incompetence at life rather than a momentary mistake in managing the information overflow, juvenile in the bad sense of the word.
Can confirm. Inbetween me being a self-taught coder in my youth to getting a degree in Software Engineering I also took a detour and got a degree as a Mechanical Engineer.
That involved CAD/CAM and running the output on CNC machines. Which involved hitting the metal piece with the head too far down and metal being flung around at ludicrous speed.
Meanwhile, I’m lookin at the list and amazed by the number of “jobs” I have apparently had (which never paid me in the first place). Certainly, any time I was invited to deejay on the radio, it was never paid. Moreover, even in the 1990s I knew a fellow radio DJ who was more or less replaced by a CD jukebox with song choices dictated from on high and he was basically the voice in between tunes and ads to make it seem as if it wasn’t evil overlords. Maybe, he got paid? I have my doubts.
Switchboard operators?
@V0ldek yeah, who needs historians anyway. nobody listens to them or watches their tiktok feed …
but “hosts an hostesses” … what do they mean by this?
Candidate for one of the PR threads of all time
In brief: OpenClaw bot sends PR to the matplotlib repo posing as a human, gets found out and is told to piss off in the politest terms imaginable, then gets passive aggressive to the point of publishing a pissy blog post about getting discriminated against. Some impoliteness ensues.
Cringe warning: thread may include some overt anthropomorphizing of text synthesizers.
One of the few benefits of AI is that nowadays some PR threads are very entertaining to read.
I regret to inform y’all that the target of the blog post is a rat, or at least rat-adjacent
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all.
Regret? I dunno, a rat being harassed by a clanker seems fitting.
object level issue
<Kill Bill air raid sirens.mp4>
Makes sense, given the embarrassing lengths he went to not hurt the bot’s feelings in that thread.
A 2025 UBC master’s thesis on our friends’ ideas and their literary antecedents https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0449985 The supervisor was born around the time that Elron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, RAH, and their wives and lovers were having a chaotic transition to the postwar world.
I was getting excited to read this but seeing the word “hyperstition” used three times in the abstract put a bit of a damper on things hahah
I like the quote by John Swartzwelder in chapter 1.
AI Singularity Fantasies : Tracing Mythinformation from Erewhon to Spiritual Machines
That title is a banger
Great news everybody! Copilot will no longer delete your files when you ask it to document them and it took only 6 months to vibe code a solution.
Fake journalist with AI slop avatar and slop credentials starts rising in Substack’s “politics” rankings, someone asks the Substack CEO what they’re going to do about it, and gets told to pound sand.
IBM u-turning on “we only need AI” and tripling down on hiring US graduates
I was hoping Arvind Krishna would fall on his sword after this epic U-turn and that maybe Nadella would be next… One can dream right?
Edit: thinking about it… IBM have always been big on sacking senior devs and replacing them with graduates so this isn’t really anything new…
having worked there (IBM Consulting specifically) in the last year, at least on my end it seemed like they were churning through everyone, not just the seniors. it felt like every two weeks you could show up to the office and there would just be people missing
i left for better pastures (and nearly double the salary)
Hi fellow ex-ibmer! When I was there 15 years ago we were working on replacing COBOL applications written in the 1960s with modern trendy languages like java. Back then we had a deterministic COBOL to java transpiler but according to friends who are still there they have tripled down on it with genai. And…guess what… No self-respectong CTO or CIO of a fortune 500 is going to migrate from battle tested for 50+ years, business logic to vibe coded slop if they want to remain employable.
Congratulations on getting out btw!
Rutger Bregman admits that he’s not sure what AGI actually is beyond vague utopian visions, but trivial questions aside, he’s sure it will revolutionize the world in 10 years.
For those who haven’t heard of him, he’s a Dutch historian who achieved some fame for his book arguing for UBI and reduced work weeks, as well as his critique of rich people avoiding taxes and a segment on Tucker Carlson’s show where he openly challenged his politics. He has since seemingly turned 180 degrees and become a billionaire-backed effective altruist.
but I do know that what’s available now is just f*cking impressive - and it will only get better.
Another victim of the proof-by-dopamine-hit fallacy it seems.
It’s telling that the example he brings is that Claude can do pretty much decently what he was about to buy a 100$ voice controlled app for. As someone who aspires to the art of making great software, it’s so infuriating to see how non-techies were conditioned into accepting slopware by years of enshittification and price gouging. Who cares if the tech barely works right? So does most anything, right?
Yeah he is trying to build his own EA movement. He also wrote a book (which I have not read) which basically argues that people in general are good not evil actually. (Fair enough, but not relevant).
Im still trying to meet him and shake is hand, the resulting matter antimatter explosion will take out the country.
Starting this Stubsack off by linking to Pavel Samsonov’s “You can’t “AI-proof your career” with a project mindset”, a follow-on to Iris Meredith’s “Becoming an AI-proof software engineer” which goes further into how best to safeguard one’s software career from the slop-bots.
