Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026
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Also pretty rich how a government (and its plutocrat backers) currently engaged in a campaign of domestic state terror have any standing to whine about other governments
I’m pretty sure he got some tongue-bathing from rich connected overseas Iranians.
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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. What a year, huh?)
Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty’s obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.
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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. What a year, huh?)
Clodswarms
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still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter’s attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence
X Updates Its Iranian Flag Emoji Design
Earlier today, X (fka Twitter) updated its design for the 🇮🇷 Flag for Iran emoji within the official Twemoji GitHub. Proposing a historic design for the flag not previously used across emoji keyboards, this change would be the X's first emoji update since its 2024 revisions of the 🔫 Pistol emoji.
Emojipedia - The Latest Emoji News (blog.emojipedia.org)
Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.
the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979
No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.
And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba’athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it’s been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.
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the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979
No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.
And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba’athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it’s been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.
Yeah it’s very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isn’t getting the story they hoped for.
Edit again, I really really wish it hadn’t come to this.
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still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter’s attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence
X Updates Its Iranian Flag Emoji Design
Earlier today, X (fka Twitter) updated its design for the 🇮🇷 Flag for Iran emoji within the official Twemoji GitHub. Proposing a historic design for the flag not previously used across emoji keyboards, this change would be the X's first emoji update since its 2024 revisions of the 🔫 Pistol emoji.
Emojipedia - The Latest Emoji News (blog.emojipedia.org)
Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.
i don’t think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i don’t think he would be able to make situation worse either. if my calculator and judgement of sources is correct, then 43k dead protesters mean that islamic republic in two days outdid past 100 years of political repression, twice.
also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlavi’s brutality in their propaganda, especially early on. for example in constitution there’s mention of “60000 martyrs” but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower
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Yeah it’s very quiet now that the media (and Musk) isn’t getting the story they hoped for.
Edit again, I really really wish it hadn’t come to this.
it’s quiet because there’s internet shutdown (19 days today) and iranians allowed to go on twitter only gaslight and emit the most disgusting propaganda you’ve likely seen in a while
if you want to avoid that, you have to either catch iraqi gsm signal from across the border, or use smuggled starlink and hope that neither EW specialist or drone notices you
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i don’t think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i don’t think he would be able to make situation worse either. if my calculator and judgement of sources is correct, then 43k dead protesters mean that islamic republic in two days outdid past 100 years of political repression, twice.
also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlavi’s brutality in their propaganda, especially early on. for example in constitution there’s mention of “60000 martyrs” but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower
Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.
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Yes, no doubt the Islamic Republic is run by bloody, murderous, dishonest bastards. My argument is that Western options for handling/imposing political will on the situation have always been limited, and are at a particularly low ebb at the moment. Change is coming to both places, but it sadly may not be change that results in greater stability.
Would be much easier if there was any kind of organised opposition within iran, but this is not the case and irgc know what they’re doing
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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. What a year, huh?)
I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).
The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they’ll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.
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I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).
The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they’ll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.
I also didn’t find the argument very persuasive.
The LLM companies aren’t paying anythnig for content. Why should they stop scraping now?
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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. What a year, huh?)
just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive “hans, are we the baddies” moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.
as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.
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Clodswarms
I spent the last few years working in a prototype testing role on an active cattle ranch (don’t ask) and this phenomenon reminds me of what’s left on the ground after the herd moves through on their way up the canyon
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I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).
The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they’ll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.
I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”.
Yeah, Gas Town is being belabored to death, but it must be reiterated that I doubt the long-term value proposition of “Kubernetes fan fiction”
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I also didn’t find the argument very persuasive.
The LLM companies aren’t paying anythnig for content. Why should they stop scraping now?
Oh, they won’t. It’s just that they’ve already killed the golden goose, and no-one is breeding new ones, and they need an awful lot of gold still.
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just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive “hans, are we the baddies” moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.
as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.
I have family working there, who told me during the holidays, “Current leadership makes me uncomfortable, but money is good”
Every impression I had of them completely shattered, cannot fathom that level out sell out exists in people I thought I knew.
As a bonus, their former partner was a former employee who became a whistleblower and has now gone full howard hughes
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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. What a year, huh?)
Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:
a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver.
it’s a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like
// TODO: check authorization.Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761
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I have family working there, who told me during the holidays, “Current leadership makes me uncomfortable, but money is good”
Every impression I had of them completely shattered, cannot fathom that level out sell out exists in people I thought I knew.
As a bonus, their former partner was a former employee who became a whistleblower and has now gone full howard hughes
anyone who can get a job at palantir can get an equivalent paying job at a company that’s at least measurably less evil. what a lazy copout
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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. What a year, huh?)
A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky’s AI Risk Estimates (ie. “Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today”)
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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. What a year, huh?)
The AI craze might end up killing graphics card makers:
Zotac SK’s message: “(this) current situation threatens the very existence of (add-in-board partners) AIBs and distributors.”
The current situation is so serious that it is worrisome for the future existence of graphics card manufacturers and distributors. They announced that memory supply will not be sufficient and that GPU supply will also be reduced.
Curiously, Zotac Korea has included lowly GeForce RTX 5060 SKUs in its short list of upcoming “staggering” price increases.
I wonder if the AI companies realize how many people will be really pissed off at them when so many tech-related things become expensive or even unavailable, and everyone will know that it’s only because of useless AI data centers?
