Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd February 2026
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Last megathread I posted about some LWer writing about “demographic collapse” in Japan (indistinguishable from anyone with any ambition leaving for greener pastures). I’ve read the comments to see if there’s any pushback, and found this absolute doozy
Life at the Frontlines of Demographic Collapse — LessWrong
This is a cross-post from: https://www.250bpm.com/p/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic • • …
(www.lesswrong.com)
yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there
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wait, was this brain-rotting cognitive hazard posted at the linked page on microsoft dot com documentation? if so they have already removed it
edit: archive caught it
what I’m thinking about is for how many years now they have been promising that just one more datacenter will fix the “hallucinations”, yet this mess is indistinguishable from nonsense output from three years ago. I see “AI” is going well
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
AI bros do new experiments in making themselves even stupider. Going from ‘explain what you did but dumb it down for me and my degraded attention span’ into ‘just make a simplified cartoon out of it’.
Proud of not understanding what is going on. None of these people could hack the Gibson.
E: If they all hate programming so much, perhaps a change of job is in question, sure might not pay as much, but it might make them happier.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
Somebody on bsky talking about various Ben Goertzel Epstein file emails.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
in today’s news about magical prompts that super totes give you superpowers:
We introduced SKILLSBENCH, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate Agent Skills as first-class artifacts. Across 84 tasks, 7 agent-model configurations, and 7,308 trajectories under three conditions (no Skills, curated Skills, self-generated Skills), our evaluation yields four key findings: (1) curated Skills provide substantial but variable benefit (+16.2 percentage points average, with high variance across domains and configurations); (2) self-generated Skills provide negligible or negative benefit (–1.3pp average), demonstrating that effective Skills require human-curated domain expertise
I am jack’s surprised face
…and given I have other yaks, I shall not step on my “software and tools don’t have to suck” soapbox right now
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who up continvoucly morging they branches
Timn
yes, I certainly do know how to handle software development over Timn
it is actually kinda incredible that this shit has invented a way to be terrible that we can’t actually easily riff off by what’s expressable in unicode. an unholy clusterfuck of what would otherwise be be joked about as keming (but isn’t because it’s straight-up an artefact of the process used to encode visual data from source data, badly), a mindless automaton outputting garbage, and then also the shitty model
and people keep telling me this shit is good
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*morgin’ timn
morgin’ all muh featues
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AI bros do new experiments in making themselves even stupider. Going from ‘explain what you did but dumb it down for me and my degraded attention span’ into ‘just make a simplified cartoon out of it’.
Proud of not understanding what is going on. None of these people could hack the Gibson.
E: If they all hate programming so much, perhaps a change of job is in question, sure might not pay as much, but it might make them happier.
I think I understand it. Think of an alcoholic that’s trying every sort of miracle hangover “cure” instead of drinking less.
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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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/
you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:
Disclaimer
Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.
even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases
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Somebody on bsky talking about various Ben Goertzel Epstein file emails.
Goertzel discusses with Epstein future scenario for “an AGI economy”:
“for the AGI parasite to overcome to regular-human-economy host (so it can grow to be more than a parasite and eventually gain its own superhuman autonomy) it first needs to suck off the resources of the host”
The Rationalists!
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Timn
yes, I certainly do know how to handle software development over Timn
it is actually kinda incredible that this shit has invented a way to be terrible that we can’t actually easily riff off by what’s expressable in unicode. an unholy clusterfuck of what would otherwise be be joked about as keming (but isn’t because it’s straight-up an artefact of the process used to encode visual data from source data, badly), a mindless automaton outputting garbage, and then also the shitty model
and people keep telling me this shit is good
and people keep telling me this shit is good
I mean, this one is really good, I got like half an hour of jokes with my friend off it
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wait, was this brain-rotting cognitive hazard posted at the linked page on microsoft dot com documentation? if so they have already removed it
edit: archive caught it
I checked yesterday and it was there, can confirm
-
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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)
Scott Shambaugh mulls about an AI alignment issue following his run-in with a bot last week
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Scott Shambaugh mulls about an AI alignment issue following his run-in with a bot last week
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i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/
you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:
Disclaimer
Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.
even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases
This is why CCC being able to compile real C code at all is noteworthy. But it also explains why the output quality is far from what GCC produces. Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.
Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it’s impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they’re a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it’s impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.
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and people keep telling me this shit is good
I mean, this one is really good, I got like half an hour of jokes with my friend off it
okay I can’t argue with that outcome
-
AI bros do new experiments in making themselves even stupider. Going from ‘explain what you did but dumb it down for me and my degraded attention span’ into ‘just make a simplified cartoon out of it’.
Proud of not understanding what is going on. None of these people could hack the Gibson.
E: If they all hate programming so much, perhaps a change of job is in question, sure might not pay as much, but it might make them happier.
my current favorite trick for reducing “cognitive debt” (h/t @simonw ) is to ask the LLM to write two versions of the plan:
- The version for it (highly technical and detailed)
- The version for me (an entertaining essay designed to build my intuition)
I don’t know about them, but I would be offended if I was planning something with a collaborator, and they decide to give me a dumbed down, entertaining, children’s storybook version of their plan while keeping all the technical details to themselves.
Also, this is absolutely not what “cognitive debt” means. I’ve heard technical debt refers to bad design decisions in software where one does something cheap and easy now but has to constantly deal with the maintenance headaches afterwards. But the very concept of working through technical details? That’s what we call “thinking”. These people want to avoid the burden of thinking.
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my current favorite trick for reducing “cognitive debt” (h/t @simonw ) is to ask the LLM to write two versions of the plan:
- The version for it (highly technical and detailed)
- The version for me (an entertaining essay designed to build my intuition)
I don’t know about them, but I would be offended if I was planning something with a collaborator, and they decide to give me a dumbed down, entertaining, children’s storybook version of their plan while keeping all the technical details to themselves.
Also, this is absolutely not what “cognitive debt” means. I’ve heard technical debt refers to bad design decisions in software where one does something cheap and easy now but has to constantly deal with the maintenance headaches afterwards. But the very concept of working through technical details? That’s what we call “thinking”. These people want to avoid the burden of thinking.
Eh, one might say that going by the broad strokes version while letting the expert do their thing is basically what management is all about, especially if they ignore the part where he wants his version to be light and entertaining.
This isn’t about managing subordinates though, this is about devising ways to be complacent about not double checking what the LLM generates in your name.
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This is why CCC being able to compile real C code at all is noteworthy. But it also explains why the output quality is far from what GCC produces. Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.
Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it’s impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they’re a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it’s impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.
spent $20k on electricity blending them
They would probably be even more impressed that you only spent $20k
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in today’s news about magical prompts that super totes give you superpowers:
We introduced SKILLSBENCH, the first benchmark to systematically evaluate Agent Skills as first-class artifacts. Across 84 tasks, 7 agent-model configurations, and 7,308 trajectories under three conditions (no Skills, curated Skills, self-generated Skills), our evaluation yields four key findings: (1) curated Skills provide substantial but variable benefit (+16.2 percentage points average, with high variance across domains and configurations); (2) self-generated Skills provide negligible or negative benefit (–1.3pp average), demonstrating that effective Skills require human-curated domain expertise
I am jack’s surprised face
…and given I have other yaks, I shall not step on my “software and tools don’t have to suck” soapbox right now
This reminds me of when Steve Jobs would introduce every new Mac release by talking about how fast it could render in Photoshop. I wonder how he would do in our brave new era of completely ass-pulling your own bespoke benchmark frameworks.
![Jack Riddle[Any/All]](https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/ca54ea94-6df3-4a0f-b75a-f11c4f6a8e32.webp "Jack Riddle[Any/All]"){kind=avatar}