this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

SoftBank Cashes Out Nvidia Stock (Archive)

I'm too jaded to get my hopes up, but wouldn't it be so nice if this were the beginning of the end for the AI bubble?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Either they're right, and the bubble pops soon, or they're too early and it's another hilarious Softbank L

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

my read of the situation is that it's another phenomenal softbank L even if they timed this sale at the top of the nvdia valuation. if they thought it's a bubble popping soon, they would try to get out of openai deals, but they're doing the opposite. most immediately, they need money to dump 20B-ish into openai by end of the year, triggered by that no-profit transition, and it's money that they apparently don't have. that their stock dumped like 15% in a week probably didn't help either

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 1 points 4 minutes ago

This. Masayoshi son is selling furniture to YOLO more money into OpenAI.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

(edit: advance warning that clicking these links might cause eyestrain and trigger rage)

so for a while now sheer outrageous ludicrous nonsense of the trumpist-era USA politics has been making a bit of an impact on the local ZA racists (and, weirdly, not only the white nationalists but also the black nationalists - some of it has shone through in EFF and BFLF propaganda strains), and I knew that with the orange godawful-king ascension to his hoped-throne it was only a matter of time before shit here escalated

anyway, it's happened. the same organisation also put up some ads along the main highway ahead of the G20 summit

(upside: some of those have already been pulled down. downside: the org put up some more. don't know what's happened with the latest yet)

fuck these people

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)
[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 2 points 9 hours ago

TIHI

I reiterate the hope that AI slop, will eventually push us towards better sourcing of resources/articles as a society going forwards, but yikes in the meantime.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

These people aren't looking for scientists, they're looking for alchemists

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Michael Hendricks, a professor of neurobiology at McGill, said: “Rich people who are fascinated with these dumb transhumanist ideas” are muddying public understanding of the potential of neurotechnology. “Neuralink is doing legitimate technology development for neuroscience, and then Elon Musk comes along and starts talking about telepathy and stuff.”

Fun article.

Altman, though quieter on the subject, has blogged about the impending “merge” between humans and machines – which he suggested would either through genetic engineering or plugging “an electrode into the brain”.

Occasionally I feel that Altman may be plugged into something that's even dumber and more under the radar than vanilla rationalism.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Pretty sure this brand of cyborg fantasizing is quite popular in mainstream rationalism, unless you're reading something more creative in this than superbabies, brain uploading and HDMI to visual nerve for undetectable on-demand pornography.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

'Genetic engineering to merge with machines' is both a stream of words with negative meaning and something I don't think he could come up with on his own, like the solar system sized dyson sphere or the lab leak stuff. He just strikes me as too incurious to have come across the concepts he mashes together on his own.

Simplest explanation I guess is he's just deliberately joeroganing the CEO thing and that's about as deep as it goes.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

"What if we figure out DNA well enough that we could edit a babby to grow NAND gate cells and put a calculator inside their body so they can do instant arithmetic like a computer?"

I assume he's talking about that kind of stuff, but being vague so you can't call him out if he gets details wrong.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Some Chat-GPT user queries were leaked via some Google Search Analytics owned by websites that ranked on the search result pages that Chat-GPT saw when searching: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/oddest-chatgpt-leaks-yet-cringey-chat-logs-found-in-google-analytics-tool/

Or something like that. It's a little confusing.

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 19 hours ago

Eurogamer has opinions about genai voices in games.

Arc Raiders is set in a world where humanity has been driven underground by a race of hostile robots. The contradiction here between Arc Raiders' themes and the manner of its creation is so glaring that it makes me want to scream. You made a game about the tragedy of humans being replaced by robots while replacing humans with robots, Embark!

https://www.eurogamer.net/arc-raiders-review

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 14 points 22 hours ago (4 children)

Not a scream just a nice thing people might enjoy. Somebody made a funny comic about what we all are thinking about

Random screenshot which I found particularly funny (Zijn rant klopt):

Image descriptionTwo people talking to each other, one a bald heavily bespectacled man in the distance, and the other a well dressed skullfaced man with a big mustache. Conversation goes as follows:

"It could be the work of the French!"

"Or the Dutch"

"Could even be the British!"

"Filthy pseudo German apes, The Dutch!"

"The Russ..."

"Scum of the earth marsh dwelling Dutch"

[–] istewart@awful.systems 2 points 14 hours ago

you know, if those ASML folks in dutchland weren't quite so busy what with their EUV lasers and all that, we might not be in quite this same pickle right now,

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 3 points 18 hours ago

You flatter me, I haven't thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 2 points 21 hours ago

I was told repeatedly growing up that they like Canadians over there because of the whole liberation thing. Is this true?

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Definitely been seeing the pattern of: “if you don’t like AI, you are being x-phobic” where “x” is a marginalised group that the person is using the name of as a cudgel. They probably never cared about this group before, but what’s important to this person is that they glaze AI over any sort of principle or ethics. Usually it’s ableist, as is basically any form of marginalisation/discrimination.

E: read the link. Lmao that’s… not xenophobia. What a piece of shit

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 3 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

New singularity dropped and I'd missed it: https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/economics-transformative-ai/coasean-singularity-demand-supply-and-market-design-ai-agents

I don't really see AI getting rid of ticketmaster or other transaction costs in the real world, so this is just some econ theory crafting.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 19 hours ago

users trade off decision quality against effort reduction

They should put that on the species' gravestone.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 2 points 15 hours ago

thanks! I tried to link it in the usual way, but I think a bug might have blanked the url box before I hit post.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Beff Jezos and friends have produced something other than tweets. Possibly. Maybe.

https://youtu.be/Y28JQzS6TlE

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 5 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

What's the elevator pitch for Extropic again? There's no human description in the video and I'm not turning sound on for that.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

What if quantum but magically more achievable at nearly current technology levels. Instead of qbits they have pbits (probabilistic bits, apparently) and this is supposed to help you fit more compute in the same data center.

Also they like to use the word thermodynamic a lot to describe the (proposed) hardware.

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 5 points 20 hours ago

"what if computation was more wrong but on the other hand was faster and used less power"?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 22 hours ago

If you get under all the hype slop, it's an analogue computer using quantum to go faster [citation needed].

This can allegedly be used to do AI computations (so matrix math?) with lower energy.

At least they don't claim to be doing qubits.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you're having yield problems, talk to that dude with his nose uncovered in the clean room @4:18

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

@dgerard @JFranek

His nostril yeast is the secret sauce.

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Trad wives exchanging starter cultures for artisinal CPU wafers

[–] pikesley@mastodon.me.uk 3 points 1 day ago

@dgerard @JFranek

"If you're having yield problems,
I feel bad for ya, son"

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Everything about this screams vaporware.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Extropic have been burning their runway, this is 100% an investor pitch. "We have a thing! please give us more money? we swear we're still Nazis"

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 1 day ago (2 children)

things are happening

I'm still kicking the tires but if this works then there might be a bit of downtime soon to make sure scrapers see more of this

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

is one of the source texts for the markov chain text generator our old favorite Harry Potter fan-fic?

[–] self@awful.systems 7 points 15 hours ago

oh you fucking know it

also all 3 parts of Das Kapital and the full text of My Immortal

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

On this topic I've been seeing more 503 lately, are the servers running into issue, or am i getting caught in anti-scraper cross-fire?

[–] self@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

nope, you’ve been getting caught in the fallout from us not having this yet. the scrapers have been so intense they’ve been crashing the instance repeatedly.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

when you get this working i am totally copying this for rationalwiki

i nearly installed caddy just to get iocaine

[–] self@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

I saw that! fortunately once iocaine is configured it seems to just work, but it's also very much software that kicks and screams the entire way there. in my case the problem wasn't even nginx-related, I just typoed the config section for the request handler and it silently defaulted to the mode where it returns garbage for every incoming request.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Just saw this post on DHH, it’s really good: https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html

If you’re not careful, one day you will wake up and find that you’ve pushed away every person who ever disagreed with you.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

David Hamburger-Helper

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Technopagans

Going to see him at the Belasco on Thur.