Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026
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.)
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
I'll start with this gem
This one is just eternally ???!!!
Okay this takes the cake wtf
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasn't written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasn't good TV or even good animation. There wasn't even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
That's it! He usually wasn't allowed to write alone. I'm not sure if we'll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asok's name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. I'm not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
as a youth I'd acquired this at some point and I recall some fondness about some of the things, largely in the novelty sense (in that they worked "with" the desktop, had the "boss key", etc) - and I suspect that in turn was largely because it was my first run-in with all of those things
later on (skipping ahead, like, ~22y or something), the more I learned about the guy, the harder I never wanted to be in a room as him
may he rest in ever-refreshed piss
ok if I saw “every male encounter is implied violence” tweeted from an anonymous account I’d see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily it’s just weird brainrot from adams here
One more:
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
it's not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Alice's anger isn't a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
@scruiser @YourNetworkIsHaunted I first noticed he was problematic in 1997 when he ran some ignorant anti-science cartoons. Here’s an example.
It's the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy -- who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! -- but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider "truth-teller."
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didn't really want that anyway. I've been reading through JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: "Why be #1 when you can be #2?"
If COVID made you a bad person -- it didn't, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened -- a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress -- then no, I'm sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, it's just a mask-off moment
@sansruse @V0ldek You left out the best part! 😂
Adams himself noted, "[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail."[63] The New York Times noted the burrito "could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste".[64]
Jesus christ that's a murder
@V0ldek @sansruse I've eaten a dilburrito and... that's accurate. Then again, I am the type of weirdo who would seriously try nutripaste.
@sansruse @V0ldek I wonder what would happen if you put a Dilberito into a Juicero.
@sansruse My jaw genuinely dropped
@sansruse @V0ldek honestly, in the list of dumb products, this is mid-tier. surely at least the juicero is dumber? literally a device that you can replace with your own hands.
i mean, obviously the dilberito is daft. but it's a high bar.
I knew there was somethin' not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
In retrospect it's pretty obvious this was central to his character: he couldn't accept he got hella lucky with dilbert happening to hit pop culture square in the zeitgeist, so he had to adjust his worldview into him being a master wizard that can bend reality to his will, and also everyone else is really stupid for not doing so too, except, it turned out, Trump.
From what I gather there's also a lot of the rationalist high intelligence is being able to manipulate others bordering on mind control ethos in his fiction writing,
Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didn't mention that part for some reason.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070222235609/http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/10/sunday_blogging.html
JWZ: The Dilbert Hole
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.
ooh, where’s the (new?) spice? I’ve been under multiple rocks
nothing formal, but the backlash to criticism is becoming absolutely disproportionate: for example, the person who made the list of slopware, kat marchán, was bullied off the social media by the slop merchants. this looks eerily similar to the right-wing braying about cultural war, where they call harassment any critique of their positions, and call a reasonable critique any harassment they do themselves.
(and just very recently the always very nice CTO and co-founder of the oxide company, a major rust shop, decided that shaming the promoters of the confabulation machines is not to be done at the company.)
you will be pleased to know that self and i are responding
see https://awful.systems/post/6913182 we need a name
It's so ironic how they claimed the list was harassment, after they harassed the person who made it away from open-source.
kat marchán goes by she/they fwiw.
one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. i'll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought "that's cool" and now my reaction is "great, gotta see if an llm was used"
everything feels gloomy.
I'm gonna leave here my idea, that an essential aspect of why GenAI is bad is that it is designed to extrude media that fits common human communication channels. This makes it perfect to choke out human-to-human communication over those channels, preventing knowledge exchange and social connection.
I am reminded of Val Packett's lobsters comment I read the other day:
It's like carbon monoxide binding to hemoglobin.
ooh, that's brilliant
OT: I’m adopting two rescue kittens, one is pretty much a go but its proving trickier to get a companion (hoping the current application works out today). Part of me feels guilty for doing this so fast after what happened, but I kinda need it to keep me from doing anything stupid.
Hey you're doing the little feller a solid. please be kind to yourself!
Don't feel bad, the faster you rescue the cat the better it is for them! I'm sure your cat wouldn't mind you making two kitties happy with a forever-home :)
We had to do the same when my wife's ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.
Skynet's backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: "Musk’s AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth says".
The article doesn't provide much more other than exactly what you'd expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: "make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component".
Me as a kid: "how could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!"
Me now: "Oh. Yeah. That checks out"
when I saw that they'd rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesn’t understand the release process and I think I’m starting to have visions of teddy k
.......I don't want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah I’m going through it ngl
OT: going to pick up a tiny black foster kitten (high energy) later this week…but yesterday I saw the pound had a flame point siamese kitten of all things, and he’s now running around my condo.
Cat tax:
What a great creature. Big ears, for hearing people say stupid things about AI.
well that’s a lovely furball :) congratulations on finding a new buddy! got a name?
Pound named him Waffle Fry, I was thinking just Waffle but I;m still looking tbh.
https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange
Cross posting from reddit but here’s TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff
I'm sorry.
Vibecamp: It's the Scott Aaronson comment section, but in person.
This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I don't really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoples' lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.
A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:
I'd never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, they're never going to grow up.
I don't wish to belittle the author's suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participants' worth.
Honestly i feel like my role in many of my friendships is simply telling people that they don’t have to follow these prescriptions and are allowed to do things outside of them, and that following these prescriptions isn’t some magic pill that is going to fix their lives, and is more likely a poison. So yeah if you started ardently believing that, I would not be opposed.
These people are bitter and sad because they are trying to perform in hypermasculine roles that only exist as fiction in marketing and propaganda. I’m bitter and sad because:
"U" for "you" was when I became confident who "Nina" was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but can't make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like "what is Hereticon?" for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions "the consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers ... leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen." Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I don't know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
I think theres a EA presence at the all the big universities now. Theres a rationalist meet up in Manitoba but nothing here thank god.
I noticed Sonia during the initial media coverage but didn’t know what to make of her. Theres another person on twitter alleging abuse at Aella’s cnc parties, I can dig them up at lunch if you want.
not to make light of abuse but I do just want to entertain the alternate world where people are holding CNC (computer numerical control) parties. I imagine they’d have a lot of caliper talk but since it isn’t about skull measurement it’s fine
That would be a much better world (btw ironworkers are great if you ever get to use one).
Manifesting a more ironworker forward 2026 bless 🙏🙏🙏
https://xcancel.com/PronouncedWrong/status/2001579301653868976#m Here it is
Transcribing (the nested blockquote is a self-quote-tweet):
That "Hereticon" link looks broken; I think it should point to this RationalWiki page.
It looks like this site requites
https://orhttp;//to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prependsawful.systems/and treats it as an internal linkI missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.
This article genuinely made me furious on this woman's behalf. It isn't like most scenes or spaces are great at handling sexual violence, but in most spaces people would not accuse you of trying to silence and hurt men by saying you were groped!
OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.
<3
Mozilla continues to cosplay as a tech company instead of being the browser developers they where supposed to be.
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path we're on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and it's ponderously flabby!
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46607681
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
So pleased that theyre not budging!
Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.
I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that it's behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.
But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me y'know? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feels... worse.
Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesn't act like an albatross around my neck (I mean I'm also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).
My problem with this is that I don't know what the actual spark for collapse would be. Like, we all know this is unsustainable vaporware, but that doesn't seem to affect the market at all. So when does this collapse? People have been talking about the collapse for two years now. Is there anything that prevents the market from just remaining insane forever and ever in perpetuity?
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid (a classic quote typically gifted anyone who wants to “time the market”, but generally very applicable to anyone these days)
I don't (directly) have a financial horse in this, I'm just afraid the market can remain irrational so long my brain becomes fucking liquid
That's exactly what I mean when I say I don't understand the stock market.
Like... how is Tesla stock a thing? I don't understand it.
Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)
Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.
Because they'll make humanoid robots that will conquer the world. At least that's the current story.
Considering how Musks businesses are being prepped up by just his force of personality and not any real proper business practices I'm not sure we should belief any predictions of doom. See also how cryptocurrencies are still a thing, and just the price of gold (which doesn't really make sense re the actual practical usage of gold (the store of value in bad times thing doesnt really make sense to me, who is gonna buy your gold when the economy crashes? Fucking Mansa Musa?).
I know a bit more about stocks and businesses (both due to education, a minor talent in it, and learning some of it for shadowrun dm purposes (yeah im a big nerd)) and all this doesnt make any real sense to me re the economic/business fundamentals.
We should be careful to not turn into zero hedge re our predictions of the bubble popping ("It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions" quote from rationalwiki), even of we all agree it is a huge bubble, and I share the same feeling that he is right on this. (See also how the ai craze is destroying viable supply businesses like the ram stuff (and more parts soon to come if the stories are correct))
We live in stupid times, and a very large amount of blame should prob fall on silicon valley, with the ipo offloading of bags bullshit. (And their libertarianism for others socialism for us stuff (see the bank which was falling over which turned them all into statists))
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
Willison:
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
Randomly stumbled upon one of the great ideas of our esteemed Silicon Valley startup founders, one that is apparently worth at least 8.7 million dollars: https://xcancel.com/ndrewpignanelli/status/1998082328715841925#m
$8.7 million is quite impressive, yes, but I have an even better strategy for funding them. They can use their own product and become billionaires, and now they can easily come up with $8.7 million considering that is only 0.87% of their wealth. Are these guys hiring? I also have a great deal on the Brooklyn Bridge that I need to tell them about!
This just makes me angry at how disconnected from reality these people are. All this talk about giving people better lives (and lots of sunflowers), and yet it is an unquestionable axiom that the only way to live a good life is to become a billionaire startup founder. These people do not have any understanding or perspective other than their narrow culture that is currently enabling the rich and powerful to plunder this country.
It somewhat goes without saying that this is the natural outcome of Paul Graham and others emphasizing the creation of new startup companies over the utility and purpose of the products and tools that those companies make. An empty business for generating more empty businesses.
A factoryFactory
A FactoryFactoryProxy, no less
A fun little software exercise with no real world uses at all: https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/about.html
Turns out that if you stuff the right shaped bytes into png image tEXt chunks (which don’t get compressed), the base64 encoded form of that image has sections that look like human readable text.
I'm apparently too
out of coffeedumb to properly get the joke. What's the implications if some system parses the PNG text chunks in the same way it does the body of the email?think LLM agentic software.
Ah, makes sense. My mind was going more towards actual security exploits, but... yeah. Makes sense.
Anyways, thank you Flere-Imsaho, I will never not love seeing your username on here.
I mean, at the rate the chucklefucks are going, a number of these things are actual security exploits
that it happens/works for a completely unhinged reason is almost a separate evaluation dimension in scoring
yes, sure, but in the sense of "social engineering the slopbot", not "there's a vulnerability in [x] which does not apply proper sanitation to non-body text content before evaluating it"
It is insane that people saw that social engineering is the number one security issue and were like “but what if we automated that?”
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isn't as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, they've stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer for...
Given the Trump administration, and the US's behavior in general even before him... and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and "Agent-4" over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasn't.
Also random part I found extra especially stupid...
LLM "agents" currently can't coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and we're supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!
The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like baby's first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too "DEI")? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?
Why do people not simply... unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. "Consensus-1" was never adequately explained it's just some weird MacGuffin in the story that there's some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.
Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.
@sailor_sega_saturn @scruiser the rise of ai has taught me that while I can physically unplug the ai, it'll lead to me being fired or even prosecuted for vandalism by some executive who doesn't understand the problem. (Probably for the Upton Sinclair reason)
It's darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didn't predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration that's sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god they're conjuring up? "Agent-4" will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.
You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit for... I think he was right that people simply won't shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesn't take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.
the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache
Man, it just feels embarrassing at this point. Like I couldn’t fathom writing this shit. It’s 2026, we have ai capable of getting imo gold, acing the putnam, winning coding competitions… but at this point it should be extremely obvious these systems are completely devoid of agency?? They just sit there kek it’s like being worried about stockfish going rogue
Reading this hilarious paper from last month, Weird generalization and inductive backdoors: new ways to corrupt LLMs. Abstract:
Not posting this at top level in order to not summon the weirdos who highlight "Hitler" on Lemmy; it's otherwise a top-tier sneer. Choice sneer, formatted for Commonmark:
Or, in case of Grok aka MechaHitler, precisely aligned
Speaking about Grok and it being a nazi, check this skeet (it has alt text and is not login protected)
The alt text of the image:
Bluesky user Séamas O'Reilly adds the commentary,
These things are just great roleplay engines, and not much else. (And I mean that in the "playing an entertaining ttrpg" way, so if you ask it to become a boring officeworker, it will not be boring as nobody plays boring officeworkers in ttrpgs (obv boring routine lives are also not what people write about so it isn't in the training data)).
New post from Iris Meredith, doing a deep-dive into why tech culture was so vulnerable to being taken over by slop machines
Iris gives opencode a spin
statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged. They've played us for fools
i am continuously reminded of the fact that the only things the slop machine is demonstrably good at -- not just passable, but actively helpful and not routinely fucking up at -- is "generate getters and setters"
A feature that every IDE has been able to do for you for two decades now
It was floated last year, and its happened today - Curl is euthanising its bug bounty program, and AI is nigh-certainly why.
Sucks, and eurgh, how horrible must any public facing job be. You see 'i asked chatgpt' everywhere and people just dont get it makes things worse. (Saw people try to resolve game mod conflicts with it)
Off topic: I am looking for some advice. I enrolled in a PhD program several years ago. After years of verbal abuse, I left my advisor's lab. Shortly after, he tried to get me kicked out of the program by giving me a failing grade, then he tried to physically intimidate me in his office (moved across the room to get in my face and scream at me). I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn't touch me or explicitly threaten violence. Later that day, he removed my name from work I had done for him, which is definitely plagiarism and a violation of the academic honesty policy.
I have an audio recording from that day of him screaming at me, as well as him basically admitting to retaliating by giving me a failing grade (I filed a grievance about this with the university and they changed my grade). I also recorded a long exchange that may not be incriminating but reinforces that he is an overbearing asshole.
I tried changing advisors but the options of available professors were limited (and the university decided that my abysmal $500 USD a week salary would get dropped to something like $300 a week), so I mastered out.
I was hoping to eventually finish my PhD elsewhere and I fear that I won't be able to (that no advisor would want to risk working with me) if I go public with this. At the same time, the thought of him continuing to teach there and not suffer any accountability is killing me. (In my grievance, I requested a public apology and he refused, telling the chair that he would instead be comfortable with a meeting moderated by the chair --- absolutely farcical.)
Does anyone have advice? Would it be worth going public (e.g. reaching out to the local press or the student paper)? I suppose I could just email human resources with the information and see what happens. Experience in this precise situation is probably limited (although academia has a lot of abusers, so maybe not).
(A week ago I was confident I would go public sometime soon. Now I just feel apprehension.)
Everything depends on the details like what country, what field, and what university. Because this involves specific people, its also inherently unpredictable. I would say that in general, a field that will accept a second go at a PhD, but won't accept a well documented HR complaint against a supervisor, is not one worth working in.
Also, a potential advisor who refuses to work with a student who stood up for their rights is not an advisor worth working with.
It is computer science in the southern united states (though I am open to finishing my PhD in Europe, especially because cryptography is an area of interest). Sorry for not mentioning this in the original post.
Thank you, I think this is something I needed to hear (read).
@Seminar2250
"I reported this to the campus police but they said nothing could be done because he didn’t touch me or explicitly threaten violence"
That sounds like assault which doesn't require contact.
"In the terminology of law, an assault is the act of causing physical harm or unwanted physical contact to another person,...
..., assault is a criminal act in which a person intentionally causes fear of physical harm or offensive contact to another person"
This is a lot more common than you'd think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly can't think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.
If you're really sure about finishing your phd, it's probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if they're close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But there's a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that there's assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and I've heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.
From a new white paper Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt, h/t The Syllabus Hidden Gem of the Week
Por que no los dos? But maybe the lenders are expecting a bailout... or just gullible...
Interesting point, if AI is basically a rounding error for GDP... But I also remember the layoffs in 2000-1 and 2014-5, they weren't evenly distributed and a lot of people got left behind, even if they weren't as bad as '08.
"It sounds so insignificant when you put it like that, I can hardly believe I'm in a bread line because of a manufactured poly-crisis it was a part of!"
Very smart commentator:
I've been made aware of a new manifesto. Domain registered September 2024.
Anyone know anything about the ludlow institute folks? I see some cryptocurrency-adjacent figures, and I'm aware of Phil Zimmerman of course, but I'm wondering what the new grift angles are going to be, or whether this is just more cypherpunk true believer stuff.
one more manifesto bro one more and it’ll fix it
I scolled around the "ludwell institute" a bit for fun. Seems like a pretty professional opinion piece/social media content operation run by one person as far as I can tell. I read one article, where they lionized a jailed BitCoin Mixer developer. Another one seems to be hyped for Ethereum for some reason.
Seems like pretty unreflected "I make money by having this opinion" stuff. They lead with reasonable stuff about using privacy-respecting settings or tools, but the ultimate solution seems to be becoming OpSec paranoid and using Tor and Crypto.
@macroplastic
Tech manifestos are so cringe.
::: spoiler CW: state of the world, depressing (USA disappears 60k untermensch in a year; three minorities massacred successively in Syria; explicit genocide in Palestine richly documented for an uncaring world; the junta continues to terrorise Myanmar; Ukrainian immigrants kicked back into the meat grinder with tacit support of EU xenophobia; entire Eastern Europe living under looming Russian imperialism; EU ally Turkey continues to ethnically cleanse Kurds with no consequences; El Salvador becomes police state dystopia; Mexico, Equador, Haiti, Jamaica murder rates lowkey comparable to warzones; AfD polling at near-NSDAP levels; massacre in Sudan; massacre in Iran; Trump declares himself president of Venezuela and announces Greenland takeover; ecological polycrisis accelerates in the background, ignored by State and capital)
:::
techies: ok but let's talk about what really matters: coding. programming is our weapon, knowledge is our shield. cryptography is the revolution…
Agile manifesto is cool, mostly because it's like 24 words long
I'm sorry but whatever you think about the actual content I'm going to be prescriptive and proclaim that the word manifesto should not be allowed to refer to opinions about management practices.
What if the opinion is to shoot the managers and seize the (means of) production
A spectre is haunting your workflow
Which is absolutely tragic given the cargo culting of ceremonies at any large software organization that make up big-A Agile, ceremonies that started as a reaction to the agile manifesto. One place I worked for even started turning non-engineering teams into Agile teams because it's Agile!
Good website too
Looks like cypherpunk slop
Via YouTube recommends, I came across this video about our favorite crypto pivot to ai NeoCloud data center company CoreWeave
How CoreWeave is near insolvency
Interestingly, the author is an LLM shill as evidenced by the video being caked with a hefty layer of copium.
Seems to have struck a nerve amongst the commentariat which didn't appreciate this kind of "FUD".
There hasn't been a new spoon design in centuries. Is spoon UX innovation dead?
E: I'm reliably informed that spoon hype is not dead!
There is this tremor stabilizing spoon for people suffering from parkinsons disease. I think that counts as spoon UX innovation.
this is so cool
that is one hardcore high tech spoon and really, really cool
Heatmap: Amid Rising Local Pushback, U.S. Data Center Cancellations Surged in 2025
regwalled, here are quotes
via WaPo, ole orange cankles is promising socialism:
Inshallah
My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out what's left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.
is it because of pushback, or is it because money is running out
From r/bonaroo in 2024, when the sun was really insisting upon itself.
::: spoiler alt text Furby smoking a marijuana. A caption says: "Vibes, but at what cost" :::
So it looks like the ongoing slow-motion train wreck around Greenland ties back to our very good friends in the technoligarchy. This is the only explanation I've yet seen for the insistence on outright annexation.
AFAIK, the people in this space who have acknowledged using LSD and other psychedelics are gwern, Aella, and QiaochuYuan (during his rationalist phase). Scott Alexander hinted that he might have tried it, Eliezer Yudkowsky is interested in psychedelic therapy but also tells readers to please not use LSD. Can any of you name anyone else in this space who has talked about dropping acid?
I don't want to get into "A says that B dropped acid" in a StubSack thread.
The 2016 Nootropics Survey results and Nootropics Survey 2020 Results suggest that it was popular with anonymous SlateStar readers.
Previously, on Awful, we considered whether David Chapman was an LSD user. My memory says yes but I can't find any sources.
I do wonder what you're aiming at, exactly. Psychedelics don't have uniform effects; rather, what unifies them is that they put the user into an atypical state of mind. I gather that Yud doesn't try them because he is terrified of not being in maximum control of himself at all times.
Yud has posted:
He seems very worried about his tendency to procrastination (akrasia in LessWrong jargon) and inability to make himself exercise. So he is concerned about inability to control himself. So his public position is that LSD might have medical uses, but it has harmed people close to him.
Wes McKineny - Why Not
EDIT
I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that's all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.
(One year later, the homelab is running a cluster of North Korean crypto-mining bots)
Why did this happen to ME?
this is why i only self-host low risk crap and it's all behind my tailnet
half the time i put my shirt on backwards, i am not going to put my password db on the public internet myself
As a fellow homelabber, I would immediately ask: Have you isolated any of your homelab's functionality and shared it with the community? No? Why not? I'll give him a little credit, as he was one of the principal authors of Apache's Parquet format and Arrow library; he does know how to write code. But what did he actually produce with the vibecoding tools? Well, first he made a TUI for some fintech services, imitating existing plain-text accounting tools and presumably scratching his itch. (Last time I went shopping for such a tool, I found ticker.) After that, what's he built? Oh, he built a Claude integration, a Claude integration, and a Claude integration.
A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.
(source on Mastodon)
Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter
It's a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.
Short of wikipedia shipping it's own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it's not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.
The "author" used Claude to write it. It's warmed-over slop.
Looks like he added a notice / disclaimer at the top last night? The talk page has some quality sneers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-01-15/Special_report
So, Copilot for VSCode apparently got hit with an 8.8 CVE in November for, well, doing Copilot stuff. (RCE if you clone a strange repo and promptfondle it.)
Fixes were allegedly released on Nov 12th, but I can't find anything in the Changelog on what those changes were, and how they would prevent Copilot from doing, well, Copilot stuff. (Although I may not be ITSec-savvy enough to know where such information would be found.)
Simon Willison defends stealing a Python library using lying machines, answering "questions" he previously "asked" in an attempt to downplay his actions.
No he won't.
He /knows/ about pcre but would rather prompt instead. And pretty sure this was already answered on stack overflow before 2014.
He didn't write a new library from scratch, he ported one from Python. I could easily hire two undergrads to change some tabs to curlies, pay them in beer, and yes, I think it /would/ be better, because at least they would have learned something.
Willison is also subtly implying the claim that his judgment on the validity of this codebase and its massively tremendous test suite, after a few hours of admittedly distracted slop extrusion, is roughly equivalent to that expensive expert team working over multiple months. Given that the entire conceit of this article is him talking to himself, I will continue to hold my reservations.
Found a solid sneer on the 'net today: https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/on-floss-and-training-llms/
@BlueMonday1984 Signal gives spinning out a spin: <https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/>