Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)
Op banned??
BlueMonday has had a tendency to go off with a half-assed understanding of actual facts and details. Each individual instance wasn’t ban worthy, but collectively I can see why it merited a temp ban. (I hope/assume it’s not a permanent ban, is there a way to see?)
the public modlog, linked from the instance sidebar:
Thanks!
So it wasn’t even their random hot takes, it was reporting someone? (My guess would be reporting froztbyte’s criticism, which I agree have been valid if a bit harsh in tone)
froztbyte’s criticism crossed the line by a bit for a couple of admins who weighed in, and they’ve been warned to ease up. reporting a post like that isn’t bannable; we’ve got more context for a report like that than we do for some rando doing a drive-by report for a tone rule that doesn’t exist, for example.
blue misused the report system in a way that wasn’t accidental or incidental, and we felt the best course of action was a cooling off period. given that they’re welcome back in less than 4 days, I’d prefer to leave it at that.
Thanks for the information. I won’t speculate further.
Not permanently, by the looks of it.
that keepassxc thing continues going wild. there’s an account on fedi that’s been stubbornly defending their choice the last few hours. see here
An obit for James Watson and his Dawkins- or Pinker-like path from a scientist to a bitter reactionary https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/
Via Emily M Bender, “AI’s capabilities may be exaggerated by flawed tests, according to new study”
Guys, the reason we don’t see working AI out in the world is because all the “frontier AI labs” are keeping the good stuff for themselves!! It’s totally not that this shit doesn’t work
Lmaou thats some good cope right there
Broke: Wyoming gold mine
Woke: Wyoming bison ranch
Bespoke: Wyoming AI lab
Also where they keep the warp engine and the zero point energy generators. Wake up sheeple.
It’s everyone’s favourite alternate browser developer back again, lamenting how mean some tech folk are and how cruelly they threaten and oppress certain groups of people.
Which groups? Oh, you know the ones 😉
spoiler
A screenshot of a twitter post by Andreas Kling, reading:
In recent years l’ve attended multiple software conference talks that had unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as “fuck [name]” and “punch [group]”.
Whenever this happened, some of the audience would clap and cheer, l’d roll my eyes, and the talk would get back on topic.
Fast-forward to today, and look at how many people in our industry are openly celebrating the murder of someone they decided was a “nazi” and “fascist”. Turns out these people were more serious than I thought.
As someone who’s repeatedly been called a “nazi” and “fascist” myself for disagreements with far-left ideology, I know how easily those labels get thrown around. And honestly, this is making me seriously reconsider which conferences I attend.
There’s a hateful rot within our industry. It shouldn’t be socially acceptable to cheer for murder. We need to do more than roll our eyes.
unrelated extreme political rhetoric in slides, such as “fuck [name]” and “punch [group]”.
why are they so bad at this
How old is this utterance (the source link doesn’t work for me). From context it looks like just after Charlie Kirk got freeze peached.
looks like you’re in the ballpark, sept 14
Some fediverse links from non-mastodon sites can’t be loaded directly, it seems… if I stick the url into my mastodon client’s search field it’ll take me to the actual post, because it’ll do the request via the fedipub api. Anyway, I appreciate that’s a pretty poor UX for most people, so I’ll try and check my links more carefully in future!
I saw the post linked yesterday, fwiw. I’m annoyed I didn’t spot that it was missing a timestamp, as that’s usually a sign of suspicious tweets.
oh, I had to find that with quoted twitter search - didn’t see it linked on javi’s post
Sam Altman got subpoena’d live on stage.
https://bsky.app/profile/walkingtaako.bsky.social/post/3m52utxcmls26
“An investigator from the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office lawfully served a subpoena on Mr. Altman because he is a potential witness in a pending criminal case,” spokesperson Valerie Ibarra said in a statement to SFGATE.
In a post on X, the group wrote that one of their public defenders had managed to serve Sam Altman with a subpoena, requiring him to testify at their upcoming trial. They explained that the case involves their previous non-violent demonstrations, including blocking the entrance and the road in front of OpenAI’s offices on multiple occasions.
“All of our non-violent actions against OpenAI were an attempt to slow OpenAI down in their attempted murder of everyone and every living thing on earth.”
So it’s not because he’s being prosecuted.
Oh yeah, it’s not the particular kind of good news we’d all like, but it is still entertaining.
Also, it is worth noting that this isn’t the normal way people get served. It’s a right hassle compared to just visiting someone at home or at the office or whatever. This sort of action is taken when the person being subpoenaed was actively evading it, but is also an egotistical idiot who is incapable of keeping a low profile.
“I think the AI slop is great. I think culturally, it’s a good thing that it happened, because one of the things that drove people to start really caring about artists again in 2024 was the AI slop. I think everything happens for a reason,” she said in a recent interview with Time. “Most of the album is sort of about me being a bit of a Diogenes about the ills of modernity while still celebrating them.”
https://www.salon.com/2025/11/07/grimes-ushers-in-a-new-era-of-internet-infestation/
JFC what world does she live in
Grimes was married to Elon Musk and performs at events for ‘heretical truth-tellers’ sponsored by Peter Thiel
Living a life as if it was able to bear a “I bought one before I knew he was a jerk” bumper sticker.
When she’s not attending the weddings of people like Curtis Yarvin.
as someone who identifies greatly with diogenes, i say: do not trust anyone who compares themself to diogenes
if you meet the Bhudda on the road, give him a high five i think
– grimes, probably
Given that this is the person who composed the ode with the hook “we appreciate power”, let’s just say that my take re their opinion in this post is rather minimal
I’m too tired to read this properly but it looks like MIT’s suggestion for better vibe coding is just… repackaged software design? Anyway, article.
It sounds a little like “natural language is an awful way to unambiguously specify systems… but what if there was a special computer language that you could use to create computer programs in? 🤯” combined with a something that sounds a lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choreographic_programming which already exists, but I guess represents a new frontier for vibe coding distributed systems, which are famously amenable to yolo development.
“Talking with all these marbles in my mouth holds huge promise, but also exposes some longstanding flaws in communication”
Also ironically enough they seem to be claiming that natural language is the future of ambiguously(?) specifying systems:
Specifications are back, even if they are now called “prompts.”
KeepassXC (my password manager of choice) are “experimenting” with ai code assistants
https://www.reddit.com/r/KeePass/comments/1lnvw6q/comment/n0jg8ae/
I’m a KeePassXC maintainer. The Copilot PRs are a test drive to speed up the development process. For now, it’s just a playground and most of the PRs are simple fixes for existing issues with very limited reach. None of the PRs are merged without being reviewed, tested, and, if necessary, amended by a human developer. This is how it is now and how it will continue to be should we choose to go on with this. We prefer to be transparent about the use of AI, so we chose to go the PR route. We could have also done it locally and nobody would ever know. That’s probably how most projects work these days. We might publish a blog article soon with some more details.
The trace of petulance in the response… “we could have done it secretly, that’s how most projects do it” is not the kind of attitude I’m happy to see attached to a security critical piece of software.
sigh
anyone got a good replacement?
sticky note under the keyboard
Kinda, but nothing I’m entirely happy with. We use bitwarden at work, at my suggestion, but I don’t like the tools as much as I do keepassxc, and even though you can self-host the network service that stores the data, you still have to host something whereas keepassxc is standalone and you can sync the password vault over some file sharing service, or carry it on a usb stick, etc. there have been a couple of incidents whereby user license data wasn’t processed correctly and people got locked out of bitwarden vaults, which is pretty serious even if it was only temporary. That can’t happen with easily-backed-up-and-restored local databases.
They’ve also had some “license controversies” which should also give you pause for thought if you were interested in a free and open system: https://www.techradar.com/pro/bitwarden-clarifies-open-source-commitment-amid-user-concerns
The original keepass project is still alive, and maybe I’ll have a look at that. The current maintainer is a bit odd, and the project has had some historical security issues, but I suspect that all password managers (at least on windows) will have the exact same problems. It is unlikely to have the same range of features, but it is written in a memory safe language (C#) rather than in C++, which keepassxc uses (and I’ve never been entirely happy with).
In short, everything is awful, and I will probably stick with xc for my own purposes for now, as there isn’t quite a replacement for me yet. I’d buy a mooltipass (https://www.mymooltipass.com/) except I’d want a backup, and that means an outlay of a good £300 which is a bit painful. And they’re often out of stock 😕
thanks, yeah we use bitwarden at work and i really don’t like the ux. plus the simplicity of just having a file to sync is very convenient to me.
i might try authpass soon, seems to look nice enough.
helpful post, ty - I’ve also been halfheartedly looking at bitwarden (possibly with vaultwarden server) and I haven’t pulled the trigger yet because extra yaks. so knowing some of the other happenings there… oof
(including pulling the trigger I’d want to have it hosted on an island instead of directly exposed, which adds other requirements and steps)
the only other option is (gnu) pass, but it sucks pretty majorly ito clients. it really isn’t a good time in password managers :|
There’s an interesting mastodon thead from back in July where someone was unhappy with the state of bitwarden and looked at a bunch of alternatives:
https://transfem.social/notes/aa2w3yuz3tfz0hdp
This also seems to have been around when keepassxc started using coding assistants, so it isn’t quite clear to me why the issue has suddenly surfaced now.
KeepArseNX
lead dev: Jia Tan
I also learned Bitwarden bought into AI reading this. They don’t appear to have let vulnerability extruders ruin their code as of this writing, but any willingness to entertain the fascism machines is enough for me to consider jumping ship.
It definitely feels like the first draft said for the longest time we had to use AI in secret because of Woke.
We regret to inform you that one of Google’s "AI leader"s is a transphobe:
https://bsky.app/profile/alexhanna.bsky.social/post/3m52bffg2222x (screenshot of relevant section)
Hey it’s the character.ai guy, a.k.a. first confirmed AI assisted kid suicide guy.
I do not believe G-d puts people in the wrong bodies.
Shazeer also said people who criticized the removal of the AI Principles were anti-Semitic.
Kind of feel the transphobia is barely scratching the surface of all the things wrong with this person.
‘I don’t believe people have an attribute called gender’
That must be one of the more dumber things I have read in a while.
I think he is stating that people don’t have an invisible eternal Gender like a Christian thinks people have an invisible eternal Soul. I am a materialist so I don’t think either exists. Shazeer goes on to complain about “sterilizing children” which is a red flag of transphobia (ie. people who post a lot about that tend to have a screw loose).
There is no need to give transphobes the benefit of the doubt really.
You don’t believe in gender? I mean you’re wrong IMO but we’re cool. But if someone says the words “I don’t believe have an attribute called gender” as part of a bunch of totally obvious anti-trans dog-whistles when butting into a discussion about transgender day of remembrance? Now it’s a problem.
People who get angry about trans people and trans theory remind me of Dawkins and friends, because what starts as a factual/philosophical concern (there are probably no gods / the idea that people have a true gender inside them sounds mystical) gets twisted in a reactionary direction. I don’t have to understand why trans or nonbinary people feel the way they do to support them as they explore ways of being humans in the world.
BTW the official way to support trans people as they “explore ways of being humans” is to punch Nazis in the face and dunk on techbros. Go forth and tell all your cis friends!
(If anyone finds some ways of not being human to explore do let me know, I’m holding out for Magical Girl)
I’d go for Motoko Kusanagi’s prosthetic body, myself, as long as I could afford the upkeep. That whole “don’t darken your Soul Gem” thing would go terribly for me.
Speaking this into existence. In an interview, Saltman suggests soul gems as the next phase in energy production for LLMs
I think that gender is a collection of roles in a specific society which people perform and have performed on them. Its not something which exists outside that context, any more than “being the king” exists outside of a legal system. Of the three statements on BlueSky, its the third (the statement about sterilizing children) which makes me think he has been consuming angry things about trans people online.
@CinnasVerses @sailor_sega_saturn two bits, the one about god and the one about sterilizing children. The second is obvious, straight from transphobic material. The first is directly against what I’ve seen some people say, “god put me in the wrong body”, as their explanation why they seek gender reassignment treatment.
At that point, what he thinks about attributes people might or might not have is of little relevance.
Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You don’t have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.
@CinnasVerses one would guess that they should work harder so his beliefs are not inconvenienced, or some similar egocentric drivel.
Now I’m wondering if that was written by gemini or grok.
Its also one of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need”, one of the founding texts of the AI ideology.
As far as I can tell there’s absolutely no ideology in the original transformers paper, what a baffling way to describe it.
James Watson was also a cunt, but calling “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” one of the founding texts of eugenicist ideology or whatever would be just dumb.
Some legitimate academic papers and essays have served as fuel for the AI hype and less legitimate follow-up research, but the clearest examples that comes to mind would be either “The Bitter Lesson” essay or one of the “scaling law” papers (I guess Chinchilla scaling in particular?), not “Attention is All You Need”. (Hyperscaling LLMs and the bubble fueling it is motivated by the idea that they can just throw more and more training data at bigger and bigger model). And I wouldn’t blame the author(s) for that alone.
what a baffling way to describe it
this is a recurring problem with them/their posts; if you look across history you can see a continual pattern of “de jour grumpword a la $somecommunity” leak forth
I have on occasion asked them to try to make better posts. they don’t seem to give a fuck to do so tho
to the latter part of my comment: both my own and also other peoples’ criticisms just turn into a dead avenue. the applicable poster just ghosts that subthread while happily posting elsewhere
guess there’s no desire to do better!
Some changes to adventofcode this year, will only have 12-days of puzzles, and no longer have global leaderboard according to the faq:
Why did the number of days per event change?
It takes a ton of my free time every year to run Advent of Code, and building the puzzles accounts for the majority of that time. After keeping a consistent schedule for ten years(!), I needed a change. The puzzles still start on December 1st so that the day numbers make sense (Day 1 = Dec 1), and puzzles come out every day (ending mid-December).
Scaling it a bit down rather than completely burning out is nice i think.
What happened to the global leaderboard?
The global leaderboard was one of the largest sources of stress for me, for the infrastructure, and for many users. People took things too seriously, going way outside the spirit of the contest; some people even resorted to things like DDoS attacks. Many people incorrectly concluded that they were somehow worse programmers because their own times didn’t compare. What started as a fun feature in 2015 became an ever-growing problem, and so, after ten years of Advent of Code, I removed the global leaderboard. (However, I’ve made it so you can share a read-only view of your private leaderboard. Please don’t use this feature or data to create a “new” global leaderboard.)
While trying to get a fast time on a private leaderboard, may I use AI / watch streamers / check the solution threads / ask a friend for help / etc?
If you are a member of any private leaderboards, you should ask the people that run them what their expectations are of their members. If you don’t agree with those expectations, you should find a new private leaderboard or start your own! Private leaderboards might have rules like maximum runtime, allowed programming language, what time you can first open the puzzle, what tools you can use, or whether you have to wear a silly hat while working.
Probably the most positive change here, it’s a bit of shame we can’t have nice things, a no real way to police stuff like people using AI for leaderboard times. Still keeping the private one, for smaller groups of people, that can set expectations is unfortunately the only pragmatic thing to do.
Should I use AI to solve Advent of Code puzzles?
No. If you send a friend to the gym on your behalf, would you expect to get stronger? Advent of Code puzzles are designed to be interesting for humans to solve - no consideration is made for whether AI can or cannot solve a puzzle. If you want practice prompting an AI, there are almost certainly better exercises elsewhere designed with that in mind.
It’s nice to know the creator (Eric Wastl) has a good head on his shoulders.
I feel like the private leaderboards are also more in keeping with the spirit of the thing. You can’t really have a friendly competition with a legion of complete strangers that you have no interaction with outside of comparing final times. Even when there’s nothing on the line the consequences for cheating or being a dick are nonexistent, whereas in a a private group you have to deal with all your friends knowing you’re an asshole going forward.
only have 12-days of puzzles
Obligatory oh good I might actually get something job-related done this December comment.
More bias-laundering through AI, phrenology edition! https://www.economist.com/business/2025/11/06/should-facial-analysis-help-determine-whom-companies-hire
I couldn’t actually read the article because paywall, but here’s a paper that the article is probably about: AI Personality Extraction from Faces: Labor Market Implications
Saying the quiet part out loud:
First, an individual’s genetic profile significantly influences both their facial features and personality. Certain variations in DNA correlate with specific facial features, such as nose shape, jawline, and overall facial symmetry, defined broadly as craniofacial characteristics
Second, a person’s pre- and post-natal environment, especially hormone exposure, has been shown to affect both facial characteristics and personality
To their credit the paper does say that this is a terrible idea, though I don’t know how much benefit of the doubt to give them (I don’t have time to take a closer look):
This research is not intended, and should not viewed, as advocacy for the usage of Photo Big 5 or similar technologies in labor market screening.
Mozilla destroys the 20-year-old volunteer community that handled Japanese localization and replaces it with a chatbot. It compounds this by deleting years of work with zero warning. Adding insult to insult, Mozilla then rolls a critical failure on “reading the room.”
Would you be interested to hop on a call with us to talk about this further?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446
Oh what the fuck why can Mozilla not just STOP. Just… STOP. Honestly sick of this shit.
Jesus fucking Christ.
I did paid work in Japanese translation once, I stopped because the ungodly amount of work wasn’t worth what they pay you. The tech people really have no idea what they’re breaking by moving fast here.
Sounds exactly like what happened at iNaturalist.
That was terrible, wasnt it?
OpenAI’s financials are putrid, but they want everyone’s retirement money. What would stop them avoiding scrutiny of an IPO by going public via the SPAC route? Sorry if this is a dumb question!
I would assume nothing stops them but I would love to get an analysis of why they may not be looking into this from someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. Best I can come up with from a complete layman’s perspective is that they’re concerned about the valuation they’d end up with. Not sure if the retail market had enough juice to actually pay for a company that is hypothetically one of the most valuable companies in the world, and puncturing that narrative might bring the whole bubble down (in a way that costs a lot of normal investors their shirts, of course).
