Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026
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The common clay of the new west:
::: spoiler transcription Twitter post from @BenjaminDEKR
“OpenClaw is interesting, but will also drain your wallet if you aren’t careful. Last night around midnight I loaded my Anthropic API account with $20, then went to bed. When I woke up, my Anthropic balance was $O. Opus was checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” Doing literally nothing, OpenClaw spent the entire balance. How? The “Heartbeat” cron job, even though literally the only thing I had going was one silly reminder, (“remind me tomorrow to get milk”)”
Continuation of twitter post
“1. Sent ~120,000 tokens of context to Opus 4.5 2. Opus read HEARTBEAT md, thought about reminders 3. Replied “HEARTBEAT_OK” 4. Cost: ~$0.75 per heartbeat (cache writes) The damage:
- Overnight = ~25+ heartbeats
- 25 × $0.75 = ~$18.75 just from heartbeats alone
- Plus regular conversation = ~$20 total The absurdity: Opus was essentially checking “is it daytime yet?” every 30 minutes, paying $0.75 each time to conclude “no, it’s still night.” The problem is:
- Heartbeat uses Opus (most expensive model) for a trivial check
- Sends the entire conversation context (~120k tokens) each time
- Runs every 30 minutes regardless of whether anything needs checking That’s $750 a month if this runs, to occasionally remind me stuff? Yeah, no. Not great.” :::
There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
Don’t worry, he eventually figured out how to make it cost much less each time his computer asked the remote AI model what time it was
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must’ve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it’s obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That’s not sustainable.
I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
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The headline alone is worthy of upvoting. About halfway through the article, the author includes an embedded YouTube video of the Dilberito Flash game. Made me reflect that 20 years ago, they might simply have directly embedded the game itself. And contemplate what the Web might look like if/when external YouTube embedding craps out.
And goddamn:
his former syndicate, publisher, and professional organizations have all declined to pay tribute or even acknowledge his passing.
I didn’t realize it was quite that harsh, but so it goes. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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Honest question, since I’m not on linkedin (and kinda looking for a new job): does it really help anyone find a job? It has been my impression from the outside that it’s mostly empty drivel.
In ~9 months of searching, I’ve gotten to two second-round interviews out of dozens of applications to LinkedIn listings. Take that as you will.
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once again, the facade of the “whoops, bad company” falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
::: spoiler transcript a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: “So what’s the deal with this ghastly woman again? She’s a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?”
the quoted tweet by aella reads: “There’s apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?” :::
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it’s a sock
Yeah, @XiWellWisher going up against Aella on X, The Everything App is well into late-SNL stages of unfunny parody
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Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation
Either deliberately whitewashing the situation or completely missing the point of why people are mad at Epstein, Yud really can’t help himself.
edit: Or depending on the timeline and the fact that ‘prison time for soliciting a 14 year old’ was on top of Epstein’s wiki as early a 2016 he’s explicitly saying they didn’t mind that part with 300k on the line.
Double-highlighting this choice bit:
Diligence is costly in executive attention,
Your periodic reminder that this man is considered a major influence by many of today’s working venture capitalists
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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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
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There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
Don’t worry, he eventually figured out how to make it cost much less each time his computer asked the remote AI model what time it was
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must’ve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it’s obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That’s not sustainable.
I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
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Honest question, since I’m not on linkedin (and kinda looking for a new job): does it really help anyone find a job? It has been my impression from the outside that it’s mostly empty drivel.
Thanks everyone for the replies
Guess I should make an account there after all… bleeeh 
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once again, the facade of the “whoops, bad company” falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
::: spoiler transcript a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: “So what’s the deal with this ghastly woman again? She’s a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?”
the quoted tweet by aella reads: “There’s apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?” :::
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it’s a sock
i don’t find that name too strange, it’s a post-ironic Online Leftist shibboleth
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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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo
Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continues…
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$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
they’re already pivoting to the narrative that “local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them”
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$1000 a week?? Even putting aside literally all of the other issues of AI, it is quite damning that AI cannot even beat humans on cost. AI somehow manages to screw up the one undeniable advantage of software. How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
As a sidenote, I think after the bubble collapses, the people who predict that there will still be some uses for genAI are mostly wrong. In large part, this is because they do not realize just how ruinously expensive it is to run these models, let alone scrape data and train them. Right now, these costs are being subsidized by venture capitalists putting their money into a furnace.
How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
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How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
I guess I can check back in six months to see how they’re doing … wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, weren’t they? That’s a bummer.
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How do these people delude themselves into thinking that the dogshit they’re eating is good?
They think it’s just that they’re early, like they did with bitcoin. Maybe in six monthsthe dogshit will start to taste great, who’s to say, and so on and so forth.
Also swengs in the USA often make absurdly more than 1K/week.
Tired: it’s required to taste
Wired: it’s an acquired taste
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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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
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they’re already pivoting to the narrative that “local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them”
and it will be trivially affordable to run them
ON WHAT HARDWARE BEN, DDR2 SCAVENGED FROM JUNKYARDS???
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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. A lot of people didn’t survive January, but at least we did. This also ended up going up on my account’s cake day, too, so that’s cool.)
Re datacenters in space:
Multiple hackernews insist that SpaceX must have discovered new physics that solves orbital heat management, because otherwise Musk and the stockholders are dumb.
Edit: may have gotten the ol URL switcharoo:
Current top comment is nice (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46862435
it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the Sun’s power
We currently make around 1 TW of photovoltaic cells per year, globally. The proposal here is to launch that much to space every 9 hours, complete with attached computers, continuously, from the moon.
edit: Also, this would capture a very trivial percentage of the Sun’s power. A few trillionths per year.
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once again, the facade of the “whoops, bad company” falls to the ground the moment she needs her hands to fill the pompoms instead of hold up the venetian mask
::: spoiler transcript a quote tweet by @XiWellWisher, reads: “So what’s the deal with this ghastly woman again? She’s a sort of silicon valley Ghislaine Maxwell?”
the quoted tweet by aella reads: “There’s apparently a pro-billionaire protest in SF on the 7th. I might go to this to support! Anybody else going?” :::
also, real weird account name on that account, wonder if it’s a sock
“pro-billionaire” sorry I just threw up in my mouth a little. Also the billionaires are the ones rushing to create the thing so many rationalists claim is an existential risk, why the fuck would you support them??
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There are other posts of the same story that include the original “dev” learning his lesson by using a cheaper model instead of just using a clock.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
Don’t worry, he eventually figured out how to make it cost much less each time his computer asked the remote AI model what time it was
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
There’s also a hackernews which is interesting : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854150
Stupid stuff openclaw did for me:
- Created its own github account, then proceeded to get itself banned (I have no idea what it did, all it said was it created some new repos and opened issues, clearly it must’ve done a bit more than that to get banned)
- Signed up for a Gmail account using a pay as you go sim in an old android handset connected with ADB for sms reading, and again proceeded to get itself banned by hammering the crap out of the docs api
- Used approx $2k worth of Kimi tokens (Thankfully temporarily free on opencode) in the space of approx 48hrs.
Unless you can budget $1k a week, this thing is next to useless. Once these free offers end on models a lot of people will stop using it, it’s obscene how many tokens it burns through, like monumentally stupid. A simple single request is over 250k chars every single time. That’s not sustainable.
I hadn’t realised quite how terrible the basic offering was. I guess every reinvented-cron-but-unaffordable project pushes the ai companies a little closer to bankruptcy, which is better than nothing, I guess.
thankfully temporarily free
god I can’t wait for the subsidies to end
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I guess I can check back in six months to see how they’re doing … wait a minute, they were saying the same things six months ago, weren’t they? That’s a bummer.
Well, sure, but that was six months ago.
