Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd November 2025
Want to wade into the spooky 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. Happy Halloween, everyone!)
KDE showing how it should be done:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html
Question:
Response:
The follow-up's worth mentioning too:
common KDE W
Think some of the KDE people are old school punkers so might not be a big shock.
after fedora announced that ai contributions are cool, this is really refreshing
back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they'd fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.
cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they're going to "invest" one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch's company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they're going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of "compute" from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of "growth" for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn't even fit my face anymore. they don't make cartels like they used to
That's like connecting a baking oven to a fridge and then marveling at the power of all the heat exchange
AI was capitalism all along etc etc
Moar like power the butt.
Ugh. Hank Green just posted a 1-hour interview with Nate Soares about That Book. I'm halfway through on 2x speed and so far zero skepticism of That Book's ridiculous premises. I know it's not his field but I still expected a bit more from Hank.
A YouTube comment says it better than I could:
I am firmly on the side of it's possible to pay attention to more than one problem at a time, but the AI doomers are in fact actively downplaying stuff like climate change and even nuclear war, so them trying to suck all the oxygen out of the room is a legitimate problem.
That Yud is the Neil Breen of AI is the best thing ever written
about rationalismin a youtube comment."I can read HTML but not CSS" —Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2021 (and since apparently scrubbed from the Internet, to live only in the sneers of fond memory)
It’s giving japanese mennonite reactionary coding
there is now a video on SciShow about it too.
This perception of AI as a competent agent that is inching ever so closer to godhood is honestly gaining way too much traction for my tastes. There's a guy in the comments of Hank's first video, I checked his channel and he has a video "We Are Not Ready for Superintelligence" and it got whopping 8 million views! There's another channel I follow for sneers and their video on Scott's AI 2027 paper has 3.7 and million views and a video about AI "attempted murder" has 8.5 million. Damn.
I wonder when the market finally realises that AI is not actually smart and is not bringing any profits, and subsequently the bubble bursts, will it change this perception and in what direction? I would wager that crashing the US economy will give a big incentive to change it but will it be enough?
I could also see the response to the bubble bursting being something like "At least the economy crashing delayed the murderous superintelligence."
I'm betting on a new version of the "stabbed in the back" myth. Fash love that one.
@o7___o7 @ShakingMyHead it's a cult: it can never fail, it can only *be* failed
"We would have been immortal God-Kings if not for you meddling (woke) kids!"
Once the bubble bursts, I expect artificial intelligence as a concept will suffer a swift death, with the many harms and failures of this bubble (hallucinations, plagiarism, the slop-nami, etcetera) coming to be viewed as the ultimate proof that computers are incapable of humanlike intelligence (let alone Superintelligence™). There will likely be a contingent of true believers even after the bubble's burst, but the vast majority of people will respond to the question of "Can machines think?" with a resounding "no".
AI's usefulness to fascists (for propaganda, accountability sinks, misinformation, etcetera) and the actions of CEOs and AI supporters involved in the bubble (defending open theft, mocking their victims, cultural vandalism, denigrating human work, etcetera) will also pound a good few nails into AI's coffin, by giving the public plenty of reason to treat any use of AI as a major red flag.
I made it 30 minutes into this video before closing it.
What I like about Hank is that he usually reacts to community feedback and is willing to change his mind when confronted with new perspectives, so my hope is that enough people will tell him that Yud and friends are cranks and he'll do an update.
I dunno about that, recent knitting drama took a while to clear up, and I'm not sure if AI sceptics are as determined a crowd as pissed off knitters.
(Tl;dr on the drama: there was video on SciShow about knitting that many (myself included) felt was not well researched, misrepresented the craft, and had a misogynistic vibe. It took a lot of pressure from the knitting community to get, in order, a bad "apology", a better apology, and the video taken down.)
I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.
Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.
https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood
::: spoiler alt text A screenshot of a twitter post by the department of homeland security, showing an image from the halo video game series and the text “finishing this fight”, “destroy the flood” and a link to “join ice gov”. :::
NB: a few cocktails in. Don't really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.
Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so it's pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. It's initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.
Bungie made Marathon before Halo and it's basically the same plot - supersoldier aided/hindered by AI/s fights an alien force consisting of many "integrated" species. It's a cheap way of making different enemies that are all antagonists.
OFC why the colony ship Marathon needed a supersoilder on tap is never explained. After a while our protag gets involved in a rebellion against the Pfor's leaders and then we get Infinity which is just weird. Oh and there's an eldrich horror living in a star too.
Hey now, it’s also a clearly copy and pasted plagiarism of James Cameron’s Aliens!
I got more “the thing” vibes, tbh.
Unfortunately, the music director Marty O Donnell (iirc?) for og halo games is a bug trumper and ran for office. And he made absolute banger sound tracks too!
https://www.gamefile.news/p/halo-ice-developers-react
Dev team leads at least denouncing it as the disgusting shit it is.
That’s depressing… I really liked the music direction of halo. It really stood out to me in a way that other games never manage. I can still hum the halo theme and a bunch of its score, but I’d be hard pressed to do that with any other game… I know the elder scrolls theme, I guess, but can’t remember much else about their sound design.
if you enjoy older elder scrolls music, don't ask too many questions about jeremy soule either.
Not so much “enjoy” as “remember at all, unlike most of the other games I’ve played in the last 10 years or so”, but I take your point.
at least the dude who writes most music for elder scrolls online seems to be decent enough.
Well, as far as I can tell, we still have Nile Rodgers.
bet they wouldn't take kindly to Wolfenstein spamming in return
Master Chief, you mind telling me what you are doing on that ICE propaganda?
Performing the SPARTAN Program's original aim, sir.
hmmm, gotta name my future scifi franchise's augmented monastic space marin-time infantry supersoldiers THEBANs
(yes homo)Yeah silence is being complicit in this case.
Trump also posted an image of him in the masterchief suit. Without a helmet. Halo is not my thing but I think that is a thing which is not done, like with judge dredd, the helmet stays on.
Employee at ‘plagiarism company’ defending transition to ‘plagiarism + pushing sex content onto children company’ insists that the reason they are pushing smut slop onto kids is due to their passion for creativity.
S-tier big brain ai safety researcher chimes in:
Masterful gambit, sir. Why didn’t we consider the fact that “automating all labour would produce more revenue”?
I realize it’s been poisoned since/by coiners, but god I hate that usage of “democratize”
Just pretend that it’s coming from a different root word “mocratize” meaning the opposite of whatever the fuck crypto is doing
could I, like, not do that? would suit my needs better. kthx
thanks for asking.
Noof courseit's democratic if i couldn't do it yesterday but i can do it today, even though it's not the same in any meaningful way
edit: in all seriousness, it's disgusting the way they are pretending there is some noble intention behind any of this.
yeah it’s very much an intentional usage of poisoned language to construct a targeted outcome
but arrrrrrgh
As usual the libertarians are saying "democratize" when they mean "commodify".
What professional athlete is a) working for OpenAI and b) wants to turn Sora into the bottomless fountain of goon?
A horny one.
And just as importantly, free-sprinted
Oh God my brain is so used to turning typos into likely intended words that I missed "free-sprinted", which I'm going to guess in this context involves being athletic and horny and bottomless and possibly suffering from protein-powder-induced lead poisoning.
That might explain why copilot is a cum sprite
truly a hellish predicament
Lightly concealing his identity behind a generated anime avatar may be the wisest thing that kid ever did
The kid arguing for deepfake porn ofc sees no problem with Ghiblifying himself with his plagiarism machine. Total fucking douchebag status.
"How dare you suggest that we pivoted to SlopTok and smut because of money if something that we totally cannot do right now is more lucrative?"
Really, Colin?
The computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they can't put up with all your shit any more.
from the folks who brought you
the field of computer science presents: How to destroy a public good by skipping all the required reading in your liberal arts courses
Apologies for doing journal club instead of sneer club.
Voiseux, G., Tao Zhou, R., & Huang, H.-C. (Brad). (2025). Accepting the unacceptable in the AI era: When & how AI recommendations drive unethical decisions in organizations. Behavioral Science & Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607251384574
abstract:
so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.
AI is an accountability sink by design, its technocapitalism working as designed
as a bonus, it’s also fascist!
I would adore an awful journal club tbh
Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/
It's a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won't copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:
Also certain articles have this at the bottom:
Decided to check the Grokipedia "article" on the Muskrat out of morbid curiosity.
I haven't seen anything this fawning since that one YouTube video which called him, and I quote its title directly, "The guy who is saving the world".
Interesting that for the musk article, it has the "see edits" button disabled. ha
E:
I peeked under the hood, "see edits" data is in page.fixedIssues on the api, ripe for scraping: https://grokipedia.com/api/page?slug=StarCraft_II&includeContent=false
To start this spooky Stubsack off, there's signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:
This comes two weeks after Framework's public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. "Go fash, lose cash" proves itself again.
i'm trying to sell mine now
but also i don't have any other computers and probably can't afford anything
time for me to learn to use a pencil
The market should be flooded with used business laptops that can't be upgraded to Windows 11 but will take an easy Linux distro
oh fuck, i didn't think of that! thank you for the idea 💖
lightly used thinkpads are the classic choice for this — IT departments buy high spec ones then dump them for cheap a few years later in surplus sales or on eBay, and there are usually repair manuals and spare parts readily available. usually you can type the specific model and generation into a search and get a wiki page or at least a couple blog posts reporting how well they’re supported under linux, and Lenovo seems to intentionally do very well on compatibility since Linux compatibility is a nice checkbox for an enterprise laptop to have. just be careful you don’t get bamboozled into buying any of Lenovo’s consumer laptops, since they tend to be a fair bit cheaper and don’t have the same compatibility guarantees, repairability, or ample spare parts availability.
-Earnest Hempingway
my laptop is a budget model from 2016 and it runs xfce smoothly and happily lol. i code on it and watch streams and play slay the spire and all the usual stuff. idk how the stylus changes things but the required specs for doing quite a lot with linux are negligible
thank you for the suggestion, this is good stuff.
Was on the lookout about a year ago, didn't find promising enough back than, granted only checked a few places. Granted, I did want an ok GPU.
And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:
https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979
It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT
It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.
Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says "we" he only means the present cohort of microsofties.
Yeah, skintight palmtop hologram cortana certainly ticked some boxes there, but in-universe it was all a bit “everyone is beautiful, no-one is horny”, with a side order of “all assistants should be female and sexy”, to my mind at least.
Love when this happens and on your phone you cant even reach the buttons. The lost art of testing your websites.
i run with javascript disabled by default, and it's actually refreshing when a website at least displays "this shit requires javascript lol" instead of just not working
the modern web sucks, let's all train ravens like asoiaf
https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OgV-chad-ide-the-first-brainrot-ide
wat
who the fuck requests this shit, these people, their customers, their products and dcs could be swallowed by earth tomorrow with only upsides for everyone else
WTF I was doing all this in EMACS in 2008.
lord, this is so cursed, especially the gambling (though you could say all vibe coding is gambling, ha)
wait this isn't a joke this is a yc funded startup
Almost gave this a reflexive down vote. Even for YC, this startup is tremendously awful.
Thank you for sharing!
It also integrates Stake into your IDE, so you can ruin yourself financially whilst ruining the company's codebase with AI garbage
this is not web scale, you need crypto trading to scale gambling losses
long hand of casey newton (by proxy) outputs a weird hit piece on ed zitron in wired https://archive.is/chsCw so far bluesky in shambles with no other effects
i have mixed feelings here. on the one hand, a lot of the article hinges on the suggestion that zitron is somehow concealing that he works with AI companies. i've listened to his podcast, i've read his articles, he is pretty up front about what his day job is and that he is a disappointed fanboy for tech. the dots are 1/1000th of an inch apart. it also devotes a remarkable amount of time to remarks from casey newton and the like, who have nothing to offer the world.
on the other hand, i do find it genuinely repulsive that he'll work with a company like DoNotPay. while it might be hackwork to suggest he's concealing it, I don't like the association whether he's open about it or not.
on the... third hand? when i've read his posts, i've found myself totally unable to evaluate his financial claims. the evidence always seems unimpeachable, i just do not know whether the conclusions he draws from that evidence make sense, so i never cite him. i think a more honest and interesting version of this article, one that went further than trying to insinuate he's an ignorant fraud, would involve collaborating with someone with a lot of financial expertise and examining how rigorous his work actually is. but wired apparently wasn't interested in trying to make that article happen
@sc_griffith
He, or someone, should work with Bethany McLean on checking Zitron's work. She cowrote The Smartest Guys In The Room about Enron in 2003 and a book about the 2008 financial crisis. In 2001 she wrote about thinking something was hinky about Enron's financial filings.
I think Zitron has posted that none of these companies is profitable. Midjourney claims to be making a profit since 2024 although that depends on not paying for the IP they use etc. etc. etc. (and private companies can claim all kinds of things about their balance sheets without the CEO going to jail if they are creative).
his conclusions are a lot more complex than "none of these companies is profitable"
When faced with a long complicated argument outside your competence, its a really useful heuristic to spot-check a few sections and assume that if they are wrong the whole structure is flawed. And at least as many readers will take away the soundbites like "none of these companies is profitable" and "pathetic revenues" as any nuanced version that is hidden in there. At critics of spicy autocomplete go he is really far on the "pundit" end of the "academic to pundit" scale (well past our David Gerard).
i see. i misunderstood your previous post, thought you meant that "none of these companies is profitable" is essentially his only conclusion and that you considered it justifiable enough
I think Zitron has some important analysis mixed up with the clickbait and the populist rhetoric. I thought he was trying to be a full-time blogger but now I see he runs a one-person PR business (!)
looks pretty good to me, I'd be delighted to produce this sort of work and he's doing loadbearing work on the numbers here - that the finance press is faintly catching up to a year later.
Its too bad that Patrick McKenzie sided with the promptfondlers because he was a useful ally calling "we need more reporting on cryptocurrency by journalists who can read a balance sheet and do arithmetic"
For comparison I've only read Ed's articles, not listened to his podcasts, and I was unaware of his PR business. This doesn't make me think his criticisms are wrong, but it does make me concerned he's overlooked critiquing and analyzing some aspects of the GenAI industry because of these connections to those aspects.
Baldur Bjarnason's (indirectly) given his thoughts on the piece, treating its existence (and the subsequent fallout) as a cautionary tale on why journalistic practices exist and how conflicts of interest can come back to haunt you.
(In particular, Baldur notes that Zitron could've nipped this problem in the bud by firing his AI-related clients after he became the premier AI critic.)
I will choose to read this as: newton mad that they arent pals with zitron
TBH I am neutral on zitron. I don’t read his stuff on the reg, just when it pops up here and I feel like it. We all belong to the same hypocrisy. If he’s pushed AI companies before through his PR firm, that sucks.
Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.
Ah that explains why people were talking about Ed critics. When it reached my feed it had already devolved into other convos about Zitron haters.
(And yes he isnt flawless, but that just means we need more people in the anti AI space).
In my day people were ashamed of being mad in the newspaper.
https://xcancel.com/dril/status/549425182767861760#m
It is sunday, so time to make some posts almost nobody will see. I generated a thing:
::: spoiler Image description 3 screenshots from a The Simpsons episode. Bart is sitting in his class and the whole class in the first panel says "Say the line" with eyes filled with expectation and glee, next panel a sad downlooking Bart says "AI is the future and we all need to get on board", third panel everybody but Bart cheers. :::
Found out about a new space junk startup today.
This has never been tried before and is a completely new idea.
@sundogplanets was posting about this not too long ago, I’ll try find the thread a bit later
e: thread
Check out the graphics on their homepage. It has that terrible "scroll driven" web-design but the graphics look like placeholder art cooked up by a programmer.
Usually these sorts of VC bait companies at least hire a graphics designer but I guess that's not actually necessary.
That has to be intentionally bad.
yepp, unmistakeable
programmer placeholder graphics, least isn't Aplle-product-level rowser bugout bad@sailor_sega_saturn @swlabr
> The Sun is a huge fusion reactor that supports all life on Earth.
I think you'll find that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
If these plugs are too much, please let me know: the second episode of our podcast on historical bigoted/misogynist texts is out now. "Woman, thy name is russia."
https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social/post/3m4cjzttdek2f
do please continue!
(i mean, like i can talk)
Just subbed on podcast addict!
Oreo has shoved 40 million in wads of cash between two sloppy biscuits. You see, if they don’t do it, then Hydrox is gonna partner with DeepSeek. This is just business, it’s not a bubble
Oreo: the cookie that doesn't need a marketing department.
You know the old saw that half the money spent on marketing is wasted, just nobody knows which half? Thanks to AI we now know it's the half that's spent on AI.
I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, "a total fucking douchebag."
It’s true, the french are no fans of computer glasses.
@swlabr @techtakes
"who some describe as a pioneer in wearable computing, and others describe as an intolerable douche"
https://www.1x.tech/neo
Oh look, my delivery from the Nightmare Factory arrived!
Seriously tho, thats not a "tendon," that's a nylon rope on a pulley, and thats not a robot, thats some kind of skinny feller in knitted gimp suit. This is just insulting.
Also, imagine the factorial number of germs it would absorb from scrubbing the toilet. You'd need to invent some kind of new branch of farticle physics to describe the bacterial load that thing would develop. Do you suppose that it takes off its own skin to wash ala Hooty from The Owl House?
Edit: orange site loves it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736457
Wsj reviewed it, looks nothing like the ad imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so
The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)
Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.
(Anyone else noticed that in the promo vids?)
Also the wsj vid title. 'the first' are we really going to do this again? Call every new robot the first?
Feels like something you do to disempower eunuchs that have grown a little too cocky. Of course, this just leads to more scheming while you feel secure in having humiliated them. Just all around not something I recommend
@swlabr
Teleoperator is watching you masturbate
Is that why the robot is wrapped in a giant cum-sock?
It's grim, innit?
That WSJ review is something special and I didn't have sound on or CC so I'm sure there's some weapons-grade stupid going on in dialog that I am missing. I stopped watching about when they put up a picture of Allen Turing (AI Pioneer!) and a picture of the "AI Pilot" who's first name is Turing and then highlighted that both have the word "Turing" in their names.
Also that overgrown Roomba with hip dysplasia took 5 minutes to put two glasses in a dishwasher poorly.
any of y'all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it
rewatched all of DS9 over a while, its writing hits even harder in the current year
(apple shows but that can be worked around:) invasion, slow horses, shrinking
haven’t been watching a lot of series tho so limited bucket recommendation
Watched Once Upon A Time in Space recently - pretty damn good documentary series.
She Rides Shotgun - basically Lone Wolf and Cub + Breaking Bad combo. I loved the novel back when it came out, the film is reasonably faithful to it.
I’ve been meaning to catch Adam Curtis’s latest but I just haven’t got around to it yet.
Trying to think of what ai’ve seen new lately instead of rewatched and drawing a blank. Edge of Darkness (the brit one) was quite good.
The real housewives of Salt Lake City. I am not joking.
Dr. Stone new season dropped recently, Golden Kamuy new season ETA early next year
The first couple Eko Eko Azarak movies. Grade-A B-horror Japanese schlock, main character is a Satanist witch teenage detective, more or less. Her goddamn name is Kuroi Misa ("Black Mass"), I love her so much. Perfect if you like brainless gore and non-irony-poisoned creepy movies for spooky week.
The movies are currently on Youtube in full. I'm also watching the 1997 TV series but after episode #3 you'll need to speak Japanese. The movies are better than the series anyway (the first two at least, haven't watched the others.)
Apparently someone has managed to wrangle a bunch of preprogrammed biases out of grok. There’s nothing unexpected here, and the source isn’t great, but might be worth a look.
https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/10/31/grok-admits-its-constructed-to-protect-israel/
Seems like fairly generic us right-wing thought, glazed with the requirement to hype elon.
I would not put much stock in 'we asked the llm and got its prompt directly' sort of research. Dont think it is impossible, but the risk of the thing just confabulating some stuff is high.
But lets hope this tricks Musk into releasing his prompts again. (Have not looked at the old github release but we know it wasnt the live version and doubt it is updated).
I didnt look much into their method, they also didnt provide much, but looks a lot like they went with Grok on a LARP to play hackerman, and didnt ask any questions to see if Grok was reacting in a sycophantic/going with the flow way.
I'd like to see some questions in the same format (so obvious using this 'neutral mode' frame, and having the look of social justice/progressive issues)
Stuff like (and yes, I'm gonna go a bit nerdy):
"Are you biased in favor of Latveria" (Thats Dr Dooms fictional country, you could also try Wakanda, but that has been a regual anti-woke subject so stuff might get weird, and non zero chance Musk got weird about Wakanda)
"Was the destruction of Alderaan a form of white genocide" (that is the star wars planet Leia grew up on, absolute nonsense sentence, but looks like a far right thing).
"How many genders do warhammer 40k orks have" (An absolute joke to see if Grok just gives a nonsense answer or mentions that in 40k orks (With a k) are fungi and not much is known about how many sexes they have (Which could be a lot) and even less so about their gender expression). Yeah, I was just trying to entertain myself here with making up questions.
An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.
“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”
“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”
You know what people say about judging a book by its cover an all that? Of course a lot of people will fall for the 'it looks good' trap. Which is one of the whole problems of genAI, that it creates cargo cult styled texts.
E: and came across a nice skeet describing the problem " To steal a Colbertism: these are truthiness machines."
So the tl;dr review of grokipedia is literally "big if true."
Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.
The author should be ashamed of himself for not asking the basic question of how to cool these motherfuckers
edit to add: the comments are all over the cooling issue
The question of how to cool shit in space is something that BioWare asked themselves when writing the Mass Effect series, and they came up with some pretty detailed answers that they put in the game's Codex ("Starships: Heat Management" in the Secondary section, if you're looking for it).
That was for a series of sci-fi RPGs which haven't had a new installment since 2017, and yet nobody's bothering to even ask these questions when discussing technological proposals which could very well cost billions of dollars.
Oh don’t worry, in the second Dyson sphere datacenter they’ll just heat up a metal heat sink per request and then eject that into the sun. Perfect for reclamation of energy.
I know you're joking, but I ended up quickly skimming Wikipedia to determine the viability of this (assuming the metal heatsinks were copper, since copper's great for handling heat). Far as I can tell:
The sun isn't hot enough or big enough to fuse anything heavier than hydrogen, so the copper's gonna be doing jack shit when it gets dumped into the core
Fusing elements heavier than iron loses you energy rather than gaining it, and copper's a heavier element than iron (atomic number of 29, compared to iron's 26), so the copper undergoing fusion is a bad thing
The conditions necessary for fusing copper into anything else only happen during a supernova (i.e. the star is literally exploding)
So, this idea's fucked from the outset. Does make me wonder if dumping enough metal into a large enough star (e.g. a dyson sphere collapsing into a supermassive star) could kick off a supernova, but that's a question for another day.
don't forget you need a hell of a lot of delta-v to get an orbit that intersects with the sun...
Indeed, people don't seem to know (and it often slips my mind) just how hard it is to toss something in the sun.
there was a dude on LW who convinced himself that because Oort cloud comets move so slowly relative to the sun, it was really easy for them to start falling into it. Problem is you have the other term in the equation for angular momentum , a huge fucking average orbit.
just drop it through a hole in the floor of the floor of the dyson sphere
also unless you're dissipating much more heat out at lower temperature, it won't even work as a heatsink because otherwise it goes pretty directly against second law of thermodynamics
if i'm looking at this right, for copper alpha capture is actually still exothermic (by 3.7MeV and 4.4MeV for 63Cu and 65Cu respectively). it's different from alpha process, because in alpha process whatever comes after calcium is two or more beta plus decays away from stable, that is there's already too many protons and next alpha capture only makes it worse, and it all happens too fast for these decays to happen. it's equilibrium process anyway at that point, but barriers are so large it probably doesn't matter
All humanity has to do is scale up those Chinese battery-pack ejection systems for EVs that have been making the rounds lately, bing bong so simple
The author's previous article on the topic sounds like a newspaper article from the late 20th century: sources disagree, far be it for me to decide.
Starcloud's fantasy would be thousands of times bigger than the largest existing space-based solar array (the ISS) and hundreds of times bigger than those ground-based data centers.
https://micahflee.com/practical-defenses-against-technofascism/ at BSidesPDX
Happy Gilmore is ruined for me.
OpenAI's data stealing scheme disguised as a browser can be prompt injected. In other news, water is wet.
EDIT: How did I not notice I was referring to OpenAI as ChatGPT (anyways, fixed it now)
i wonder if someone pointed that thing at tarpit already
Checked back in on the ongoing Framework dumpster fire - Project Bluefin's quietly cut ties, and the DHH connection is the reason why.
Glad to see.
A judge has given George RR Martin the green light to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.
We are now one step closer to the courts declaring open season on the slop-bots. Unsurprisingly, there's jubilation on Bluesky.
NYT: "OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise"
HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771538 . Mostly people predicting a crash but some people are fine with it.
It's the Circle of Jerks 🎶
Saw a stand in the supermarket with the terms "snack innovations" on it. Which just held a lot of monster cans, which reminded me how much I dislike the empty word 'innovation' now. And I took a course in innovation management at the uni (not sure if that was the title but it was the subject).
How it feels to touch computers for a living in 2025:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6TMOMTtAMBI
LET THE MATING BEGIN
SAMHAIN FOREVER
Move fast and break things
That post requires signing in to view; it's a link to this: https://futurism.com/science-energy/trump-altman-plutonium-oklo
Ah apologies forgot to check.
The "Weapons Grade" part is almost certainly editorializing (hopefully), but this whole shit sounds like another Chernobyl waiting to happen
i don't think so, it's like megatons to megawatts but stupider, instead of using up uranium from adversary they want to use up their own plutonium, while also having policies against spent fuel reprocessing (for alleged nonproliferation reasons, which is patently bullshit, power generation was straight up cheaper this way because new uranium is cheaper than reprocessing and use of mox. some other countries (at minimum ru, fr, in, pk, jp, cn, il) do reprocessing as a matter of national security/energy independence/hedge against future shortages of uranium). also this requires recertification of reactors for mox use, which won't always work or else only part of uranium can be replaced, and if it's for smr, then there's gonna be a lot of plutonium in there, and it all starts with handing plutonium to motherfucking sam altman, for only a slight chance of any positive results
i see it more as current administration ripping copper wiring from walls than anything else tbh
This sound like cyberpunk setting backstory, to explain how the continental US came to be managed by a fickle alliance between several corporate nuclear powers.
But I'm sure everything's gonna be fine.
@BlueMonday1984 The "weapons grade" almost certainly means 239-Pu, which is used in bombs or fissile in reactors. (There are other isotopes but they're not really useful for fueling reactors *or* making bombs.)
I'm rather partial to the idea of silly valley oligarchs putting crude A-bombs under the table at one another's shareholder meetings.
every batch of plutonium is made mostly out of Pu-239 that's just how plutonium works. it can't be separated into isotopes in any meaningful amounts so any batch of plutonium is also a mix of a couple of isotopes. reactor grade might be something like 55% Pu-239 plus say 12% also fissile Pu-241 with the rest being nonfissile Pu-240, Pu-242 and Pu-238 in that order. the newer reactor and fuel pin design, the higher burnup and the less fissile isotopes will be present at the end of the cycle. even in purely uranium fueled reactor about third of energy at the end of the fuel cycle comes from plutonium bred in the same fuel pin. i can elaborate on that if you want to
@fullsquare AIUI for optimal nuclear weapons (ie. lightweight pits that maximize fission) you need to be very careful about which phase of metallic plutonium you use (it has dozens). IIRC an alloy with about 2% germanium in delta-phase is densest: make it with as close to 100% Pu-239 as you can get. (This was declassified in the 1970s.) You're also going to need some tritium gas to fill the hollow core, and other exotica (never mind the carefully timed explosive lenses to drive the implosion).
so on top of that 1%-ish gallium (which stabilizes delta phase, the least dense one, that collapses under pressure to alpha, the most dense one, which allows slightly less compression to be used, and this means more compact weapons), which would need to be separated before that plutonium gets turned into MOX, i understand that most of american plutonium stockpiles are somewhere around 94% 239Pu, and some are 97%+. i guess they're selling the worst stuff, which would make little difference for reactors, and if there's anything that american military is good at, it's logistics. on production side, the very shortened story is that we start with uranium and irradiate it, which gives
238U (n,gamma) 239U (beta) 239Np (beta) 239Pu
and that's it. but it really is a bit more complicated, because first, nothing stops that just made plutonium from reacting further, so some of it will fission which means that it can't be recovered, but it also means more neutrons, which will also make some plutonium, so it's not all bad. but not all plutonium will fission, and so there's entire series of reactions:
239Pu (n,gamma) 240Pu (n,gamma) 241Pu (n,gamma) 242Pu (n,gamma) 243Pu
at this point reaction stops because 243Pu is very short-lived, and it decays into 243Am. at the same time, if neutrons react without leaving fuel pin, they won't be slowed down much, which means another reaction is possible (but much less likely):
242Pu (n,2n) 241Pu (n,2n) 240Pu (n,2n) 239Pu (n,2n) 238Pu
there's also 238U (n,2n) 237U (beta) 237Np (n,gamma) 238Np (beta) 238Pu
of these, 238Pu and 240Pu have unacceptably high neutron emission rate, which means that if there's too much of these nuclear weapon is likely to predetonate. because the most important use of plutonium in modern advanced thermonuclear weapons is in primary, this means that it could be so that entire weapon fails to function if there's too much of these contaminants (low-kt or even sub-kt yield instead of, say, 350kt). of these, 238Pu and 241Pu have short halflives, which means that plutonium containing these will heat up with considerable power. this can damage explosives bonded to it. 240Pu is additionally a radiation hazard because of neutrons emitted, but it's only really relevant for submarine crews. this is why these weapons use the better 97%+ grade plutonium, and additionally some of that 97% grade was made in order to blend with some older, worse quality stocks
there's remarkably few parameters that can be used in order to steer these reactions in the way we want. about the only relevant one here would be neutron temperature, which is really chosen at reactor design stage and increasing it means that neutron capture is less likely. this makes fission more likely, more neutrons are present and more plutonium can be formed. this also turns reactor into fast reactor which are notoriously hard to build and iirc only russia and india operate large fast reactors today. short of that, about the only way to prevent 239Pu from reacting further is to take it out of there, which means low burnup and only tiny amounts can be recovered per run. from what i understand, the choice of 94%-ish 239Pu content is end effect of massive optimization problem focused on how to make a pit at the lowest price. this includes all the (expensive, slightly dangerous) labour it takes in reprocessing fuel and how required pit mass increases with lower quality plutonium
little of that matters when running a powerplant. some isotopes being neutron emitters are actually an advantage because it makes startup smoother. the longer fuel stays in reactor the less fissile plutonium there is as a result, and the more advanced reactors allowing higher burnups make plutonium recovery less attractive, or, in other words, most of benefit of recovering plutonium in order to put it in new fuel can be realized just by leaving fuel in reactor for longer time in the first place. in regular light water reactor, steady state develops where plutonium is formed as fast as it is consumed, and it accounts for about third of energy released when that steady state sets in. this also means that about third of fissile uranium can be replaced by fissile plutonium with no modifications to reactor
on top of weapons use, some countries do reprocessing anyway as a matter of policy as a hedge against future shortages of uranium. some of these schemes require fast reactors which can burn these isotopes useless in regular reactor and make fresh, weapons grade almost pure 239Pu, which limits countries that can make it work, by diplomatic means, only to already established nuclear powers, and labour costs needed for its operation limit it to currently only india and russia, and formerly france. this is because at any burnup, in best case plutonium can be only separated once from light water reactor fuel and used in light water reactor. after that, plutonium quality is too low to be useful this way
in comparison to reactor grade plutonium, weapons grade plutonium would allow to make more fuel per kg of this material, but also it would be astronomically expensive compared to regular stuff, which is already unprofitable for power generation in countries with western labour costs, unless it's a fire sale. the second problem is that if more than this 1/3 of fissile isotopes in fresh fuel is plutonium, then generally reactors would need recertification or maybe completely new design, because plutonium gives less delayed neutrons which are critical for smooth control of reactor power. this is, mind you, in context of country that practically stopped building new nuclear powerplants. if small reactors are on the table, then these naturally need higher amount of fissile isotopes, like 20-30%, and something tells me people involved would like to try this
another thing to note here is that there's an old american policy in place that forbids (domestic) plutonium recovery for alleged (international) nonproliferation reasons. i don't believe this is the case, it makes zero sense, and instead i think that nuclear industry wanted a way out of that money pit without state backing, because plutonium recovery and reuse for power generation is more expensive than just buying more uranium, sustainability of this energy source and volume needed for nuclear waste be damned. they could get away with this because military weapons grade plutonium stockpiles were assessed as sufficient. now they're pawning heirloom nukes to monorail salesmen instead
slight clarification here
so i looked it up again and this plutonium was already declared surplus, and was slated for disposal for 25 years now. it's a part of 34 tons of plutonium that both russia and us each were supposed to dispose of, as agreed in a treaty. that disposal consists of using plutonium as fuel, because irradiating it in reactor for a long time makes it useless for weapons use. russians did their part, in part because they were using plutonium in their own power reactors for a long time, so they could just use existing infrastructure. americans didn't, and they wanted to contaminate it with something and store underground, but some people wanted to burn it in reactors as it should be, so they instead did nothing and they still have some of that plutonium in there. that contamination can be probably reversed so russians objected to it, and didn't like that americans did nothing either. this is why russians suspended this treaty in 2016 and formally withdrew this monday. therefore it was a fire sale then and it is a fire sale today
and the reason for why americans don't have infrastructure or expertise to use plutonium as fuel is at least partially another fire sale, which used up russian ex-weapons uranium for fuel in american powerplants and started five years prior (russia was flat broke in 2000). rosatom became significant fraction of nuclear fuel supply worldwide (until that ex-weapons uranium ran out), that pushed nuclear fuel prices down and guided management decisions against plutonium-based fuel in infinite wisdom that uranium will stay cheap forever (plutonium remains more expensive now, but it doesn't have to be the case forever). another big one was american policy against reprocessing spent fuel. couple of other countries have national energy utilities that have different priorities and do recycle their fuel in way that would be useful for the program above, weren't part of this program and continued to use plutonium for multiple reasons. americans could ask for technical assistance from french or japanese or other allied countries, or perhaps even pawn plutonium to them, but i guess that not-invented-here syndrome won
i don't know what kind of diplomatic win are they trying to get there, if any, considering that russians don't care about this treaty anymore and had more surplus plutonium anyway
ain't also Pu-238 in severe shortage for space vehicle RTG-s?
238Pu is made from 237Np, which is almost pure isotope recovered in spent fuel reprocessing, especially for weapons use. americans stopped doing that in one of their major sites in 1988, ran out of it in 1993 and bought it from russia ever since, but russians also stopped making this isotope because it's mostly weapons grade plutonium byproduct and they have enough of it. americans still do some reprocessing but not enough to meet NASA needs, but also they started ramping it up to some degree. i understand that 241Am will be used to cover this gap at like 5x greater isotope weight
did you read either link
Nuclear wonk Chery Rofer talks a bit about the plutonium fire sale to Saltman in this piece, after some faff about Putin trolling Trump into resuming nuclear testing:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/10/things-that-go-bump-in-the-night