Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

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

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

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

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

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

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[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 15 points 4 days ago

Uh-oh, renowned everyman Sam Altman opened his mouth again.

Local inference is a terrible allocation of scarce resources.

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we're going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we're not going to need all the stuff in the data centre

but from a global allocation perspective, actually it's quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time

you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment, somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that

[-] BioMan@awful.systems 4 points 2 days ago

And here I thought I was building servers two years ago because the next Asian war would disrupt supply chains.

[-] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Much better for RAM to be sitting behind a network hop with 100 milliseconds of latency amirite?

if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

We're all trying to find the guy who did this .jpg

Edit: also lol at the unstated implication that no one should ever want to use RAM for anything besides getting blathered at by a chatbot.

The CEO claimed that AI will potentially be able to create something as important as the transistor, or discover major efficiency gains

Did anyone ever fall for this ridiculous argument when it was used for "uhmm actually the massive datacenter buildout is great for global warming because chatbots will chat at us how to make better solar panels or something"?

[-] schnoopy@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago

It's inefficient allocation of resources for every town to have their own library. The space sits unused a lot of the time and every library needs to allocate space to walls/doors/cpunters etc. Plus duplicate books.

Instead everyone should have one megalibrary per country.

This is good, I am smart, invest in bookly: 5he startup for buying all the books in the world

[-] cstross@wandering.shop 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

@sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes Much better for everyone if Salesman Sam owns all your RAM and leases it back to you by the refresh cycle!

[-] fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net 8 points 4 days ago

@cstross @sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes
It is also terribly inefficient to have everyone keep a fraction of the world’s money when it could all be concentrated instead in the hands of Sam Altman, benevolent dictator-god-king for life.

[-] fazalmajid@social.vivaldi.net 4 points 4 days ago

@cstross @sailor_sega_saturn @techtakes
And he is working on the “for life” problem…

[-] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

no, the most optimal way for it is to sit unused in some warehouse in taiwan, because dc isn't built for it yet but nvidia has to get money

[-] adamrice@c.im 6 points 4 days ago

@sailor_sega_saturn Whenever someone says “But someday AI will cure cancer/make us all rich/solve global warming,” the only possible response should be "why aren’t you using it for that already?”

[-] kevingranade@mastodon.gamedev.place 5 points 4 days ago

@sailor_sega_saturn @Architeuthis <literally republishes papers about fundamental transistor design with authors scrubbed off>
"See it invented the transistor!"

[-] mardor@ruhr.social 12 points 4 days ago

@Architeuthis @BlueMonday1984 Now let’s talk about privately owned cars versus public transport, Sam.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

Not that Altman's company is ahead in the AI coding race, but everyone's PCs will still need increasing amounts of DRAM to be able to run the next generation of slop-coded JavaScript apps.

[-] cyclopentane@rheinneckar.social 8 points 4 days ago

YOU CAN TAKE MY LOCAL COMPUTE FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS

[-] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

5%? Mister I run firefox.

[-] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

I'll donate my RAM to SAlty if he comes to collect it in person, and only if I can deliver it straight to his dome

this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026

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