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.)
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 “Farm and Home Management Educators”
WTF
@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.
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.
@V0ldek@awful.systems @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems I see how you might find historians ridiculous but have you considered… proofreaders?
@V0ldek @BlueMonday1984 Archivists are less at risk than historians? Quality thought went into this.
Also mathematicians - have they seen how LLMs “solve” problems.
@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.@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.
@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/2507.07935Meanwhile, 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.
“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
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.
That’s not just smart, that’s capital-J Jenius.
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.
better read the study yourself, here https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
Yesss, and it’s still worth playing today!
@V0ldek Oh no, what will happen to the ::checks notes:: switchboard operation industry??
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 Models?! The very form that captures AI and large language?! Models?!
So AI LLMs are at risk of destroying themselves?
How poetic.
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 @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.”)
@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?
Switchboard operators?
Even if you’ve never heard of him before and know nothing else about him… this short tweet alone tells so much about what kind of person he is.
Interesting first job your mind goes to there Yud. Might spend a little bit less time around people who regularly use the word goon but who never talk about the mob.
Groan, you don’t need to finish high school to learn about false dichotomy.
in follow-up posts he talks about how he’s broadly in favour of job automation, but has doubts our current government would be able to do that without fucking everyone over, he specified that “if it were a 1950’s government and congress I’d be more hopeful”
…so instead of proposing a solution like “protest against this” or “vote people in power who actually are responsible” he jumps to “your daughter should give up her career and become a sex worker for AI company shareholders”
with the Epstein shitstorm still raging, I would not be saying a damn thing about young women being sex workers for rich and powerful dudes
fuck this tweet and fuck yud
Is this really Big Yud’s account ? Different nick than previous screenshots.
It’s his alt for people who want more yud spam, hence “all the yud.” From his twitter bio:
This is my serious low-volume account. Follow @allTheYud for the rest.
The other one is meant to be serious? And low volume??
Have to get a new apartment, I did not understand that you have to apply via AI application screening now for so many buildings. I don’t know why it won’t read my statement from the credit union. I hate this so much.
Dear rentier class, maybe don’t force people to upload PDFs your bot can’t even open, swear to god someday you will make someone mad enough they inject some prompts into the files metadata and go from there.
“As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts”
Medical malpractice as a service, coming to a GP near you
A prompt enjoyer does eschatology. Along the way he abuses mathematics, Ohio, and a chinchilla.
2034 eh?
I recently purchased a couple of decent red wines with the intent to age them appropriately. Vendor said 8 years was good, so I Sharpied “'34” on the label and felt really really old when I did so.
Anyway, 18 Jul 2034 is as good a date as any to uncork one of them to enjoy. Marked my calendar!
You could’ve probably given me a good 80~100 rounds and I still would not have guessed that set of items
And I’ve been watching these dipshits for a while
(the first two I could’ve guessed/converged to within 10~20 I suspect, but a chinchilla? Fucked from left field, I tell ya)
Cool! I keep on saying that there will be at least one more AI bubble before 2045, because IIRC that’s the latest date for a singularity that Kurzweil gives, and this dude comes along with a date that’s conveniently ~halfway between now and then for people to anchor on. Thanks dude! If I find an online sod retailer that sells single square feet, I’ll send you some grass to touch!
I though Kurzweil’s latest singularity date was 2032 or smth
He might have revised it in more recent publications and/or brainfarts. If I were a Responsible Internet Debater™, I would go check, but the whole point is that i could give a fuck
funny how all the tech CEOs are the ones who are saying in the next couple years and all the researchers give 10-20 year timelines. surely this does not mean anything about the reliability of the companies and their claims
It’s always Miller(ite) Time
https://x.com/MrinankSharma/status/2020881722003583421
Anthropic safety research lead quits the field entirely to write poetry with a somewhat cryptic note. Trying to read between the lines here, the most likely explanation (IMO) is that he developed a guilty conscience and anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology. Ah well, nevertheless they persisted.
Another research poet drops, this time Zoë Hitzig from Open AI https://archive.is/dfuzP Are research poets a thing I just didn’t know about?
She’s quitting because of the introduction of ads, but falls short of either realising or just admitting that OpenAI never cared about safety - they cared about hedging expensive legal risk.
Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?
Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?
Is this a political long play to maintain her desirability as a future hire?
Someone should write both a paper and a poem about that.
@fiat_lux @sansruse
> Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?Probably but I can’t speak to this directly.
> Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?
I used to be this naive, though in my defense it’s a combination of naivete and heavy exposure to propaganda.
@fiat_lux @techtakes Yes, they’re that naive.
Fish don’t notice the water they swim in and don’t realize life exists outside of it. And the whole AI bubble is 100% capitalism-centric. (Research institutions got priced out of the game a few years ago and are tinkering around the margins.)
Anthropic doesn’t actually give a shit about any of the human harms created by the technology
but yeah it sounds like they got overwhelmed by all the shit happening in the world (there is a lot of shit happening in the world, especially in America) and left for their own mental health’s sake
you’re right, Amodei and others have published a lot of criti-hype, shameless hype, and delusional anthropomorphization in the past few years. While i was looking for other examples of their bullshit I found this article which was published just after my comment, with a nice sneer:
edited to say thanks for sharing the article
it’s listed author, David J. Temple, is a collective pseudonym used by several authors including by Marc Gafni, a disgraced New Age spiritual guru who’s been accused of sexually exploiting his followers
why does shit always have to turn out weird
Especially for a guy named Sharma living in the US. It doesn’t take too many footsteps outside the Bay area for him to be in literal physical danger right now.
He also less cryptically posted his plans and resignation letter.(Edit: memory lapse) xcancel version of resignation letter post. Tl;dr moving to the UK (understandably) and doing a poetry degree (I didn’t accidentally critique someone into quitting, did I?)Honestly, I hope he finds both what he’s looking for and also what he’s not looking for but still equally needs. For example, a personal perspective not entrenched in institutional ontological frameworks.
Yeah, I can’t hold it against anyone for feeling scared and overwhelmed with what’s happening in America right now and fleeing. Hope he finds happiness soon
I did a five line PR to a little shell util I’ve used for a decade or so, and bickered with the stupid PR bot. Fuck you kody, you have bad taste, go away, go back to enterprise.
I want to force feed it Worse is Better until it chokes, surely that’s in its corpus somewhere.
ok done venting
Eliezer, I would be very careful about talking about age of consent if I were you
load-bearing “fairly”
here’s another very good take from baldur bjarnason, answering the question if he had hardened his stance against LLMs.
(the answer is “not exactly”, and you want to read the whole thing, because the answer itself is the least interesting part of the essay.)
The whole thing’s worth reading, but this snippet in particular deserves attention:
Tech companies have done everything they can to maximise the potential harms of generative models because in doing so they think they’re maximising their own personal benefit.
it’s full of quotable bangers like this, and it’s hard to choose the one to quote, right.
Elon Musk pivots from mars colony tweets to moon colony tweets (xcancel).
I’m not quite clear on what “self-growing” means here given how inhospitable the moon is.
Self growing like a video game, for example a colony in eu4, initially it costs a lot of gold per month to keep sending colonists, and when you reach 100% growth it becomes a full province on which you can build things.
If only more journalists go: ‘we don’t know what this means either, and when we asked him he started shouting slurs at us’.
given how inhospitable the moon is.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
Given it’s the Moon a better comparison would be a Greenland colony in EU5 where it costs gold initially and then costs your precious sanity, as you are doomed to ship tonnes and tonnes of food and materials there for centuries because there is nothing fucking there and the whole endeavour was a huge mistake.
Have not done eu5 so didnt know they improved the system. But indeed.
Not that it matters for the pro let billionaires colonize space crowd. As some thing some thing ai robots are magic. See also how they are planning datacenters in space, and dont think there is a real solution for the whole ‘what if you need to flip a switch or replace a fan’ problem.
The moment I’ve learnt chuds like Musk and Sammy Boi treat the speed of light as just a thing that they can solve with sufficient computational power I started treating all their claims like a 5yo talking shit. It’s really all you need to know about them.
wasn’t Musk financing people who were gonna “hack the simulation” at one point?
Iirc he even claimed he thought at times the world was a simulation made just for him. Im starting to think he isn’t in a healthy place mentally.
E: ow god he thinks you can cool things in space, because vacuum.
You could even say she is a harsh mistress.
what if the moon got mad tho
Tell Luna you’ve been a bad boy/girl/etc and need to be punished and see what she does.
on first reading I thought you were talking about a specific luna (who I shall not tag here) but who is definitely somewhat of a kinkposter
still might mean that, haha
Luna is a very common transfem name
Yeah, I’m aware :)
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
self-growing
the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies
You could also technically do all of that debugging before you even get to the moon, though. Also has the added benefit of not dying if something goes awry.
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
There’s also a better chance that Elon exits the planet sooner.
He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.
Yeah he is one of the few space fan billionaires who actually didnt go up. Shows he at some level knows he is full of ahit.
Shhh, don’t tell him.
the virile space men will have
i’ve heard they like to read sf, they might want to read heinlein’s luna stories and miss the point entirely
If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.
as usual, felon just has no imagination and is basing his silly plan straight off any number of scifi books. but some dipshit stan is of going to ecstatically praise him for this “revolutionary” “forward-thinking” idea
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.
