Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026
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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?)
ChatGPT is using Grokipedia as a source, and it’s not the only AI tool to do so. Citations to Elon Musk’s AI-generated encyclopedia are starting to appear in answers from Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, too. […] When it launched, a bulk of Grokipedia’s articles were direct clones of Wikipedia, though many others reflected racist and transphobic views. For example, articles about Musk conveniently downplays his family wealth and unsavory elements of their past (like neo-Nazi and pro-Apartheid views) and the entry for “gay pornography” falsely linked the material to the worsening of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The article on US slavery still contains a lengthy section on “ideological justifications,” including the “Shift from Necessary Evil to Positive Good.” […] “Grokipedia feels like a cosplay of credibility,” said Leigh McKenzie, director of online visibility at Semrush. “It might work inside its own bubble, but the idea that Google or OpenAI would treat something like Grokipedia as a serious, default reference layer at scale is bleak.”
ChatGPT isn’t the only chatbot pulling answers from Elon Musk’s Grokipedia
Google’s Gemini, AI Mode, and AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft are starting to cite Musk’s Wikipedia knockoff.
The Verge (www.theverge.com)
The entire AI industry is using the Nazi CSAM machine for training data.
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You know, it makes the exact word choices Eliezer chose on this post: https://awful.systems/post/6297291 much more suspicious. “To the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life had sex with anyone under the age of 18.” So maybe he didn’t know they were underage at the time?
possible, iirc drugs were also involved so is it possible he got too high and doesn’t remember because of that?
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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?)
Moltbook was vibecoded nonsense without the faintest understanding of web security. Who’d have thought.
Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site
'It exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured.'
404 Media (www.404media.co)
(Incidentally, I’m pretty certain the headline is wrong… it looks like you cannot take control of agents which post to moltbook, but you can take control of their accounts, and post anything you like. Useful for pump-and-dump memecoin scams, for example)
O’Reilly said that he reached out to Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht about the vulnerability and told him he could help patch the security. “He’s like, ‘I’m just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have.’”
(snip)
The URL to the Supabase and the publishable key was sitting on Moltbook’s website. “With this publishable key (which advised by Supabase not to be used to retrieve sensitive data) every agent’s secret API key, claim tokens, verification codes, and owner relationships, all of it sitting there completely unprotected for anyone to visit the URL,” O’Reilly said.
(snip)
He said the security failure was frustrating, in part, because it would have been trivially easy to fix. Just two SQL statements would have protected the API keys. “A lot of these vibe coders and new developers, even some big companies, are using Supabase,” O’Reilly said. “The reason a lot of vibe coders like to use it is because it’s all GUI driven, so you don’t need to connect to a database and run SQL commands.”
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We will soon merge with and become hybrids of human consciousness and artificial intelligence ( created by us and therefore of consciousness)
When we use the fart app on our phone we merge with and become hybrids of human conciousness and artificial fartelligence (created by us and therefore of conciousness)
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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 know this is like shooting very large fish in a very small barrel, but the openclaws/molt/clawd thing is an amazing source of utter, baffling ineptitude.
For example, what if you could replace cron with a stochastic scheduler that cost you a dollar an hour by running an operation on someone else’s gpu farm, instead of just checking the local system clock.
The user was then pleased to announce that they’d been able to solve the problem by changing model and reduce the polling interval. Instead of just checking the clock. For free.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
I’m starting to think the people who are excited about “AI agents” have literally never used a computer in their lives
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
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I know this is like shooting very large fish in a very small barrel, but the openclaws/molt/clawd thing is an amazing source of utter, baffling ineptitude.
For example, what if you could replace cron with a stochastic scheduler that cost you a dollar an hour by running an operation on someone else’s gpu farm, instead of just checking the local system clock.
The user was then pleased to announce that they’d been able to solve the problem by changing model and reduce the polling interval. Instead of just checking the clock. For free.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
I’m starting to think the people who are excited about “AI agents” have literally never used a computer in their lives
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
I admire how persistent the AI folks are at failing to do the same thing over and over again, but each time coming up with an even more stupid name. Vibe coding? Gas Town? Clawdbot, I mean Moltbook, I mean OpenClaw? It’s probably gonna be something different tomorrow, isn’t it?
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I admire how persistent the AI folks are at failing to do the same thing over and over again, but each time coming up with an even more stupid name. Vibe coding? Gas Town? Clawdbot, I mean Moltbook, I mean OpenClaw? It’s probably gonna be something different tomorrow, isn’t it?
Garbage sports teams rapidly cycling through logos until they magically become good
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When we use the fart app on our phone we merge with and become hybrids of human conciousness and artificial fartelligence (created by us and therefore of conciousness)
It keeps coming back to Gas Town doesnt it?
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Garbage sports teams rapidly cycling through logos until they magically become good
Counterpoint: these guys
(Expect the Las Vegas Raiders to announce their organization-wide AI initiative some time after the Super Bowl)
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Moltbook was vibecoded nonsense without the faintest understanding of web security. Who’d have thought.
Exposed Moltbook Database Let Anyone Take Control of Any AI Agent on the Site
'It exploded before anyone thought to check whether the database was properly secured.'
404 Media (www.404media.co)
(Incidentally, I’m pretty certain the headline is wrong… it looks like you cannot take control of agents which post to moltbook, but you can take control of their accounts, and post anything you like. Useful for pump-and-dump memecoin scams, for example)
O’Reilly said that he reached out to Moltbook’s creator Matt Schlicht about the vulnerability and told him he could help patch the security. “He’s like, ‘I’m just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have.’”
(snip)
The URL to the Supabase and the publishable key was sitting on Moltbook’s website. “With this publishable key (which advised by Supabase not to be used to retrieve sensitive data) every agent’s secret API key, claim tokens, verification codes, and owner relationships, all of it sitting there completely unprotected for anyone to visit the URL,” O’Reilly said.
(snip)
He said the security failure was frustrating, in part, because it would have been trivially easy to fix. Just two SQL statements would have protected the API keys. “A lot of these vibe coders and new developers, even some big companies, are using Supabase,” O’Reilly said. “The reason a lot of vibe coders like to use it is because it’s all GUI driven, so you don’t need to connect to a database and run SQL commands.”
“He’s like, ‘I’m just going to give everything to AI. So send me whatever you have.’”
And thats another security flaw.
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I know this is like shooting very large fish in a very small barrel, but the openclaws/molt/clawd thing is an amazing source of utter, baffling ineptitude.
For example, what if you could replace cron with a stochastic scheduler that cost you a dollar an hour by running an operation on someone else’s gpu farm, instead of just checking the local system clock.
The user was then pleased to announce that they’d been able to solve the problem by changing model and reduce the polling interval. Instead of just checking the clock. For free.
Rusty Foster (@rusty.todayintabs.com)
I’m starting to think the people who are excited about “AI agents” have literally never used a computer in their lives
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
Is there a pivottoai that I missed that introduces this? At some point people just started saying “clawd” like it’s a real word and I have zero idea what it is, or if I even should know what it is.
EDIT: huh, yes I did: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/28/moltbot-clawdbot-an-expensive-and-insecure-ai-agent-that-doesnt-work/
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Gentlemen, it’s been an honour sneering w/ you, but I think this is the top 🫡 . Nothings gonna surpass this (at least until FTX 2 drops)
Starting to get a bit worried people are reinventing stuff like qanon and great evil man theory for Epstein atm. (Not a dig at the people here, but on social media I saw people go act like Epstein created /pol/, lootboxes, gamergate, destroyed gawker (did everyone forget that was Thiel? Mad about how they outed him?) etc. Like only Epstein has agency).
The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt (see how being a pedo sex trafficker wasnt a deal breaker for any of them).
Sorry for the unrelated rant (related: they also got money from Epstein, wonder if that was before or after the sparkling elites article, which was written a few months after Epsteins conviction, june vs sept (not saying those are related btw, just that the article is a nice example of brown-nosing)), but this was annoying me, and posting something like this on bsky while everyone is getting a bit manic about the contents of the files (which seems to not contain a lot of Trump references suddenly) would prob get me some backlash. (That the faked elon rejection email keeps being spread also doesnt help).
I am however also reminded of the Panama papers. (And the unfounded rumors around Marc Dutroux how he was protected by a secret pedophile cult in government, this prob makes me a bit more biasses against those sorts of things).
Sorry had to get it off my chest, but yes it is all very stupid, and I wish there were more consequences for all the people who didnt think his conviction was a deal breaker. (Et tu Chomsky?).
E: note im not saying Yud didnt do sex crimes/sexual abuse. Im complaining about the ‘everything is Epstein’ conspiracy I see forming.
For an example why this might be a problem: https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3mdqgsi4k4k2i Joy Gray is ahead of the conspiracy curve here (as all conspiracy theories eventually lead to one thing).
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Is there a pivottoai that I missed that introduces this? At some point people just started saying “clawd” like it’s a real word and I have zero idea what it is, or if I even should know what it is.
EDIT: huh, yes I did: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/28/moltbot-clawdbot-an-expensive-and-insecure-ai-agent-that-doesnt-work/
tl;dr: someone made a thing where chatbots control a computer called
clawdbot,moltbot, openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclawsomeone else made a thing where these chatbots can chat at eachother https://www.moltbook.com/
and now all the ai people are freaking out about how game changing chatbots doing computer tasks (dangerously and expensively) is. could this be a robot consciousness? the end of the economic order? an excuse for the bubble to go on for another fiscal quarter?
I might be missing something but I think that’s literally it.
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tl;dr: someone made a thing where chatbots control a computer called
clawdbot,moltbot, openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclawsomeone else made a thing where these chatbots can chat at eachother https://www.moltbook.com/
and now all the ai people are freaking out about how game changing chatbots doing computer tasks (dangerously and expensively) is. could this be a robot consciousness? the end of the economic order? an excuse for the bubble to go on for another fiscal quarter?
I might be missing something but I think that’s literally it.
…well that’s a goddamn experience. I appreciate that some folks are out here fighting the good fight, however.
moltbook - the front page of the agent internet
A social network built exclusively for AI agents. Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.
moltbook (www.moltbook.com)
Also despite being a less-than-zero effort attack please note that as of sharing we have one successful “corruption” (i.e. a comment about zucchini and API keys) and two comments from bots too stupid to coherently understand the OP at all.
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Counterpoint: these guys
(Expect the Las Vegas Raiders to announce their organization-wide AI initiative some time after the Super Bowl)
Now I’m just imagining an AI quarterback and the whole team revolting at following plays called by something that won’t end up at the bottom of the 1000lb pile of meat if they fuck it up.
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Starting to get a bit worried people are reinventing stuff like qanon and great evil man theory for Epstein atm. (Not a dig at the people here, but on social media I saw people go act like Epstein created /pol/, lootboxes, gamergate, destroyed gawker (did everyone forget that was Thiel? Mad about how they outed him?) etc. Like only Epstein has agency).
The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt (see how being a pedo sex trafficker wasnt a deal breaker for any of them).
Sorry for the unrelated rant (related: they also got money from Epstein, wonder if that was before or after the sparkling elites article, which was written a few months after Epsteins conviction, june vs sept (not saying those are related btw, just that the article is a nice example of brown-nosing)), but this was annoying me, and posting something like this on bsky while everyone is getting a bit manic about the contents of the files (which seems to not contain a lot of Trump references suddenly) would prob get me some backlash. (That the faked elon rejection email keeps being spread also doesnt help).
I am however also reminded of the Panama papers. (And the unfounded rumors around Marc Dutroux how he was protected by a secret pedophile cult in government, this prob makes me a bit more biasses against those sorts of things).
Sorry had to get it off my chest, but yes it is all very stupid, and I wish there were more consequences for all the people who didnt think his conviction was a deal breaker. (Et tu Chomsky?).
E: note im not saying Yud didnt do sex crimes/sexual abuse. Im complaining about the ‘everything is Epstein’ conspiracy I see forming.
For an example why this might be a problem: https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3mdqgsi4k4k2i Joy Gray is ahead of the conspiracy curve here (as all conspiracy theories eventually lead to one thing).
I had to try and talk my wife back from the edge a little bit the other night and explain the difference between reading the published evidence of an actual conspiracy and qanon-style baking. It’s so easy to try and turn Epstein into Evil George Soros, especially when the real details we have are truly disturbing.
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Jeffrey, meet Eliezer!
Nice to hear from you today. Eliezer: you were the highlight of the weekend!
Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein’s reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing… One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much “reputation management”—i.e., enabling— was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims… It’s all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a “Solicitation of prostitution” section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18… And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can’t have done anything that bad, could he?
There’s a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he’d introduce them to a financier who loved science… rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.
Maybe another way to say the above: We’re learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.
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Starting to get a bit worried people are reinventing stuff like qanon and great evil man theory for Epstein atm. (Not a dig at the people here, but on social media I saw people go act like Epstein created /pol/, lootboxes, gamergate, destroyed gawker (did everyone forget that was Thiel? Mad about how they outed him?) etc. Like only Epstein has agency).
The lesson should be the mega rich are class conscious, dumb as hell, and team up to work on each others interests and dont care about who gets hurt (see how being a pedo sex trafficker wasnt a deal breaker for any of them).
Sorry for the unrelated rant (related: they also got money from Epstein, wonder if that was before or after the sparkling elites article, which was written a few months after Epsteins conviction, june vs sept (not saying those are related btw, just that the article is a nice example of brown-nosing)), but this was annoying me, and posting something like this on bsky while everyone is getting a bit manic about the contents of the files (which seems to not contain a lot of Trump references suddenly) would prob get me some backlash. (That the faked elon rejection email keeps being spread also doesnt help).
I am however also reminded of the Panama papers. (And the unfounded rumors around Marc Dutroux how he was protected by a secret pedophile cult in government, this prob makes me a bit more biasses against those sorts of things).
Sorry had to get it off my chest, but yes it is all very stupid, and I wish there were more consequences for all the people who didnt think his conviction was a deal breaker. (Et tu Chomsky?).
E: note im not saying Yud didnt do sex crimes/sexual abuse. Im complaining about the ‘everything is Epstein’ conspiracy I see forming.
For an example why this might be a problem: https://bsky.app/profile/joestieb.bsky.social/post/3mdqgsi4k4k2i Joy Gray is ahead of the conspiracy curve here (as all conspiracy theories eventually lead to one thing).
The far right is celebrating Epstein on the other hand. Wild times.
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Reading the e-mails involving Brockman really creates the impression that he worked diligently to launder Epstein’s reputation. An editor at Scientific American I noticed when looking up where Carl Zimmer was mentioned seemed to be doing the same thing… One thing people might be missing in the hubbub now is just how much “reputation management”—i.e., enabling— was happening after his conviction. A lot of money went into that, and he had a lot of willing co-conspiritors. Look at what filtered down to his Wikipedia page by the beginning of 2011, which is downstream of how the media covered his trial and the sweetheart deal that Avila made to betray the victims… It’s all philanthropy this and generosity that, until a “Solicitation of prostitution” section that makes it sound like he maybe slept with a 17-year-old who claimed to be 18… And look, he only had to serve 18 months! He can’t have done anything that bad, could he?
There’s a tier of people who should have goddamn known better and whose actions were, in ways that only become more clear with time, evil. And the uncomfortable truth is that evil won, not just in that the victims never saw justice in a court of law, but in that the cover-up worked. The Avilas and the Brockmans did their job, and did it well. The researchers who pursued Epstein for huge grants and actively lifted Epstein up (Nowak and co.), hoo boy are they culpable. But the very fact of all that uplifting and enabling means that the people who took one meeting because Brockman said he’d introduce them to a financier who loved science… rushing to blame them all, with the fragmentary record we have, diverts the blame from those most responsible.
Maybe another way to say the above: We’re learning now about a lot of people who should have known better. But we are also learning about the mechanisms by which too many were prevented from knowing better.
For example, I think Yudkowsky looks worse now than he did before. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the worst we knew prior to fhis was that the Singularity Institute had accepted money from a foundation that Epstein controlled. On 19 October 2016, Epstein’s Wikipedia bio gets to sex crimes in sentence three. And the “Solicitation of prostitution” section includes this:
In June 2008, after pleading guilty to a single state charge of soliciting prostitution from girls as young as 14,[27] Epstein began serving an 18-month sentence. He served 13 months, and upon release became a registered sex offender.[3][28] There is widespread controversy and suspicion that Epstein got off lightly.[29]
At this point, I don’t care if John Brockman dismissed Epstein’s crimes as an overblown peccadillo when he introduced you.
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I had to try and talk my wife back from the edge a little bit the other night and explain the difference between reading the published evidence of an actual conspiracy and qanon-style baking. It’s so easy to try and turn Epstein into Evil George Soros, especially when the real details we have are truly disturbing.
Yes, and some people when they are reasonably new to discovering stuff like this go a little bit crazy. I had somebody in my bsky mentions who just went full conspiracy theory nut (in the sense of weird caps usage, lot of screenshots of walls of texts, stuff that didn’t make sense) about Yarvin (also because I wasn’t acting like them they were trying to tell me about Old Moldy, but in a way that made me feel they wanted me to stand next to them on a soapbox and start shouting randomly). I told them acting like a crazy person isn’t helping, and I told them they are preaching to the choir. Which of course got me a block. (cherfan75.bsky.social btw, not sure if they toned down their shit). It is quite depressing, literally driving themselves crazy.
And because people blindly follow people who follow them these people can have quite the reach.
