Want to wade into the sandy, 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. The spooks are well underway.)

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[–] 14 points 1 day ago (15 children)

Unhappy thought: For whatever future we've got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

    First up: thanks for your hard work here in the sneer mines during these ridiculous times!

    I saw this being ignored on HN and I thought that you might appreciate it:

    Navier-Stokes Lost in Translation -- Why Lean Verification of AI Autoformalisation Does not Guarantee Correct Natural Language Proofs

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.08144

    The authors point out that automatic translation of natural language mathematics into Lean is very hard, actually. They also highlight some examples of such translation errors in the Navier-Stokes "paper" published by OpenAI. They tread lightly and don't take a position on the correctness of the proof, but they do bring a large stack of receipts.

    I also thought the reference to the Solvability Complexity Index (which is new to me) was interesting, and there's an appendix with an explainer on how the SCI hierarchy is constructed. According to this scheme, autoformalisation of natural language proofs is strictly harder than the Halting Problem.

    I haven't had a chance to check on the bona fides of the authors.

    This is all beyond my level, but I'd love to see what our local experts think of it in light of the recent gish galop.

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  • [–] 8 points 19 hours ago (1 child)

    There's apparently an "Association for Human Mathematics" that has released the following statement:

    Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.

    Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.

    Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI's assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.

    Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

    Stuff like this highlights that the "info"dump was an act of contempt toward professional mathematics. If OAI actually gave a damn about people, they could have coordinated with actual researchers in the relevant fields to clean up the documents while putting a human face on them. Put everything behind NDAs, fund some grants and fellowships, and if it leaks? So what, it would have been actual good press and built hype. Plus, it would have weeded out the the obvious garbage and they'd have brought a lot of young researchers inside the tent.

    But nooooooo, they chose violence, because they are assholes. They'll never forgive the academics for doing the work and actually being good at math and physics.

    I know I'm preaching to the choir, but damn I'm stirred up.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

    One of the proofs that OpenAI announced yesterday is for a major open problem in the field I'm working in. I tried to read it but it was a completely incomprehensible 100+ page output. I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. (I had known about the results weeks in advance before their official announcement. There is a bunch of more drama there that I won't get into.) Putting aside the serious possibility of Lean bugs, a lot of people don't realize that there is ultimately no point in having a machine just generate Lean blobs endlessly. The reality is that mathematicians have always done math for the sake of enjoyment or understanding, and math contributes to society by improving understanding. Still, I am worried about the convenient social arrangement that allowed many mathematicians to do this for a modest living.

    Anyway, I'm sure it was a good idea to apply the full might of capital for pure math problems, instead of less important social issues like climate change. We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).

    Edit: Here is an article by Quanta which I think accurately describes the situation that mathematicians are going through right now: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago

    so what i'm getting from this is the only kind of progress openai and friends are capable of is progressing from slop grenades to slop airstrikes, and so far it only works because they have good marketing, augmented by their own bot farms, and because money is all you need, and so far they haven't ran out of money

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  • [–] 5 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

    I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?

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  • [–] 6 points 22 hours ago

    personally I feel like all this shit is a continuation/outgrowth from the crypto "whitepaper" phenomenon: ~zero substantive engagement with the actual discipline in question, and "work product" (quotes intentional) equal to some claims with a "proof" thrown out as its defense

    (it also continues to be part of a cultural and knowledge DDoS, which others have written better on)

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  • [–] 4 points 22 hours ago

    Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!

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  • [–] 3 points 21 hours ago*

    If it's actually exploiting a bug in a formal system, no. If it's a natural-language (unformalized) document which no one can understand, no. On the other hand a formal proof not using bugs which can't be understood, is still considered a proof, though its value is lower than an understandable proof (because as you said in another comment, the real value is in understanding rather than theorems). The prototypical example before LLMs was the proof of the four-color theorem which relied on computer-checked casework.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago

    We even got a more efficient discrete Fourier transform, improved from O(n log n) to, I shit you not, O(n (log n)^0.9999999999999)).

    rational investors enabling marginal utility... thasss capitalism in action baybeeeee

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    If it makes you feel better, the applied / empirical side is just as fucked as pure math. My unhappy thought is we spent 30 years as a discipline trying to decontaminate after The Bell Curve dropped and now, AI Murray will haunt me from beyond the grave.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago

    It isnt going to just be math, programming, various sites filled with usefull information that are now being closed because they keep being hammered by bots (or ddos attacks if they manage to actively block the bots) etc. What a waste.

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