Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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. Also, happy Pride Month, peeps)
Tom’s hardware is normally pretty boostery imo. For example, they published an article about token costs getting to be enough of a problem that Altman had to address it and somehow managed to reference “tokenmaxxing” without using the meme template of the guy jamming a stick into the wheel of his own bike. Also they notably don’t reference the increases in token pricing as the VC subsidies run out, which is somehow both less surprising than the lack of sneering and also a more serious omission.
This is OT and reveals how much I interact with the orange website but I still found it very funny.
if sneak of all people finds your adoration of Ayn Rand idiotic, then you’ve truly fallen down the wrong path.
Credit to John Rogers for the canonical reply:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
“And then I said to her, ‘This Atlas is Shrugged but mine isn’t’, gesticulating at my crotch”
So i have been using DuckDuckGo a bit more, and really disappointed to see they have basically banned rationalwiki.
RationalWiki no longer has technical staff, just a bit of help from @davidgerard@circumstances.run. To deal with bot swarms, possibly launched by Emil Kirkegaard’s gang of racists with sensitive egos, they blocked some of the scrapers which Bing and Google rely on. Since 2022 DuckDuckGo is a front-end for Bing.
That’s bizarre. Why?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79948695/how-can-i-avoid-using-llms-as-a-software-developer
For me, the ideal usage case for LLMs are not prompts like “write this app” or “write this functionality” which indeed will often wreck havoc, but instead write simple functions. Sure, I can implement a matrix multiplication algorithm or search for optimised versions of it, but so can the LLM in a matter of seconds.
Please, just fucking don’t, BLAS and sparse pack and the netlib exists for a reason. Matrix multiply only sounds simple to you because you don’t actually care that much. The last thing anyone wants or needs is to start a new job and have to debug your awful regurgitated Numerical Recipes In C, incorrectly ported to python, AT SCALE.
Easiest way to avoid using LLMs as a software developer appears to be to get a religious exemption
Found a fun sneer at AI anthromoporphisation in the arXiv: If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II
Borrowing Gary’s take on this since its the first one I found
TLDR: A lot of AI company stocks dropped last night, half a trillion dollars gone. Trump is considering having a government stake in OpenAI and other leading AI companies (aka thinly veiled bailout)
It’s a shame Gary Marcus is usually right because his writing style and personality are so annoyingly smug. He hates LLMs but only because he wants his own methods to be the path to AGI (or we could just… Not try to build AGI?) and wittering on about Trump bailing out OpenAI being socialism (bailouts are not generally considered socialism - it’s such an annoying tic to just shout socialism any time governments do something you don’t like).
Still great to see the stock market cottoning on - hopefully this sticks and it’s not just short-lived deepseek panic again
Unfortunately with mass media and social media you just have to accept that the people who get the biggest audiences will like attention and get some of the details wrong. They are built to create stars not spread facts.
The last few years have showed many disadvantages of the ‘AGI’ quest which were not widely foreseen. Those disadvantages do not depend on the technology.
Yeah in a lot of LLM critiques he prattles on about neurosymbolic AI way too much and it really throws me off
Gary Marcus speculates they are upping their prices because they literally can’t afford to hold out. I’m wondering if it is because they need better numbers for their IPO. VC funding be circulated to create nice sounding statements, but IPO filings have a standard of rigor where trying that would be fraud. So they are trying to squeeze their customers to get a few good looking (i.e. revenues higher than operating costs) quarters for the IPO.
Here is a (partially paywalled) blog post on why the indexes started to bend the rules https://rupakghose.substack.com/p/s-and-p-nasdaq-and-the-spacex-ipo
Today in signs of changing times, “we used to call that a botnet”: https://blog.includesecurity.com/2026/06/the-smart-tv-in-your-livingroom-is-a-node-in-the-aiscraping-economy/
In Buttcoin related news, apparently Michael J. Saylor has sold some of his bitcoins because he was running out of money and we reached sub 60k. For a quick non dutch source on the selling see this from r/buttcoin (last image). 32 bitcoin was enough to cause a crash. Imagine if Satoshis bitcoins ever moved.
Huh, interesting, when the price was close to 100K I saw roughly eighty-six hundred headlines about it everywhere. But it lost almost half of that and it didn’t make the news? Huh. I wonder how that works.
It did make the Dutch news, the headline was something like ‘bitcoin drops after biggest holder sells’.
I was very disappointed to learn they ment saylor, and not that Satoshi had returned and cashed out and crashed everything.
There’s some polymarket drama around this where people were betting if Microstrategy would sell any bitcoin before June based on onchain data or credible reporting yadda yadda.
And indeed Microstrategy sold some bitcoin before June and this was credibly reported on.
So of course in the grand tradition of cryptocurrency prediction markets Polymarket resolved the bet to “no”.
It’s hard to find any good reporting about this, but here’s the perspective of someone who lost 500k on this bet: https://xcancel.com/willo2_poly/status/2061640812132516321
Lol, lmao even.
Willo2 writes:
I supported Polymarket for years because I believed they represented crypto values.
In fact, their platform is simply another bucketshop where if you bet too much, you’re going to get cleaned.
“I’m shocked, shocked! to find that gambling is going on in here”
Looks like Polymarket does, in fact, represent crypto values.
S&P have decided not to allow SpaceX early entry into the index after all https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/sp-global-keeps-fast-entry-proposal-unchanged-spacex-listing-looms-2026-06-04/
“To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in its most recent quarter as well as for the sum of its most recent four quarters, according to one of the rules S&P left unchanged.”
OpenAI and Anthropic right now: oh no
Part of me wants to believe the whole S&P special treatment announcement was designed to bait them into disclosing numbers, but the more realistic side of me believes this is a nervous backpedal because they’ve realized the inevitable consequences of allowing this blunder to play out in full.
A company has to disclose a lot of numbers backed by serious legal penalties before an IPO.
Whenever a stock market has gone up 29% in a year and a New Era story is circulating, people with corner offices and Savile Row suite start to do stupid ****. I think that is why financiers started to bend the rules.
To be included in the S&P 500, a company must be profitable
This is just discrimination. Is S&P scared of innovation? HFSP
“Claude, draw me a slide to advertise Claude. Make sure to use the word “Claude” 17 times.”
“You got it boss”
Spoiler for obviously AI generated image because really who wants to see that nonsense anymore
Mention “workflow” in a prompt and Claude will dynamically create an orchestration plan that it strictly follows, allowing you to confidently trust that every stage happens in the right order even across 100s of agents.
Previously, on Lobsters, we considered the degree to which Claude Code is configured via hard prompts instead of something more effective. Claude Code also often gets confused about its status in its internal workflow, the one which multiplexes chain-of-thought utterances (“thinking”), user input, and generated output (“confabulated bullshit”). Next time Claude Code source is leaked, I expect that we’ll see how poorly it “strictly follows” user-provided workflows, too.
Malkovich?
Malkovich Malkovich!
oppan Malkovich style
Nightmare blunt rotation
Oops! All Claude
Off-topic but this seems like a place that appreciates an insane legal dispute: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/everyone-in-this-lego-dispute-should-have-spoken-to-a-lawyer-earlier-than-they-did/
If Schneider had talked to a lawyer before doing half of what he did, he might have accomplished more with less collateral damage. Though it might not have made such “good content.”
Congratulations, Mike! You figured out why pranktubers do pranks and post videos of those pranks! It’s for clicks and attention and ad money. You’re such a smart guy, Mike.
All summaries of this topic are going to get a lot of things wrong because they are legislating too many details. We can simplify this to what actually matters: a pranktuber got a lot of footage of legal First Amendment activity and they are going to use it to simultaneously destroy a mid-sized Lego pawn-shop franchise and extract a settlement from the police department of American Fork, Utah. In the process, they revealed that there is a whisper network of Mormon good old boys who will willingly lie on police reports, escalate situations to violence, abuse the legal system in any way they can to disenfranchise others, and generally don’t feel any fealty towards the Constitution or its rule of law. This story is about MLM: Mormon Lego Mafia.
We can simplify this to what actually matters
I was initially drawn into his dry recounting of the details, and overlooked that he was false-equivocating (obnoxious but legal) “content creator” activity with police corruption and willful violation of some very clear and foundational laws.
The article collects a lot of information, and isn’t out right wrong, but I find the author under-sympathetic to someone that didn’t have the financial resources to challenge a corrupt corporation and decided going viral was their best bet. Also, I find the author’s language in a comment:
if you put yourself in the cops shoes (something I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing) they show up and from their vantage point it’s a bunch of rowdy out of town youtuber influencer kids against local homeowners in the community.
Is grossly too sympathetic to cops. The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
The author is basically rationalizing and portraying sympathetically the way cops side with wealth and capital over the actual law.
It’s techdirt what else do you expect?
Heck I’m not sympathetic to local homeowners and I’m a local homeowner. We suck. At least I’m not a cop.
They want to build a Woe Engine next to our zoo.
https://www.change.org/p/nashville-zoo-says-no-to-proposed-data-center
I’m sure the tigers won’t be driven to a homicidal rage by the incessant Hummmmm.
It’s so dumb that I wonder if it’s some sort of profile-raising stunt.
CW M:tG weirdo Zvi’s slobsack + Xhitter references, but he accuses an OpenAI / Palantir-funded PAC boosting a fake “AI doomer” account calling for violence:
ed zitron went on bloomberg podcasts, these might be actual end times
Maybe that why it’s felt like he’s been somewhat more polite and explanatory of required knowledge in his latest posts.
I’ve got to give it to him, he found a winner and didn’t give up.
these might be actual end times
Good thing all those CEOs have Daddy Trump to run to while everyone else foots their bill
Not that this is news to anyone here but hey there’s a bubble
Time for another once in a lifetime financial crisis.
CW: USA Politics
That suppressed Democratic National Committe 2024 “postmortem” report turns out to have been pure slop, with essentially no references and entirely made-up charts and plots while also missing entire sections. The author can produce exactly zero interview transcripts or source data. It also neglects interrogating failures in addressing trans rights, the genocide in Gaza, or the affordability crisis.
The podcast “It Could Happen Here” does a good job of analysis (disgusted), but long-time sneerers will feel the futility of getting into the weeds with an extruded textual artifact:
Tl:dl the deeply institutionalist DNC chairman appointed his best buddy to the job with zero oversight, and this was the result.
