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Welcome to November, and 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.)

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[-] robjwells@awful.systems 3 points 3 hours ago

Took one look at the post, “this is all slop isn’t it”, and sure enough the authors couldn’t even do the traditional academic’s single-commit dump without “co-authored by: Claude”.

The “recursive self-improvement” nonsense really baffles me. Excluding those who have a financial motive to talk about it, I don’t understand why anyone would think this would ever be possible for LLMs.

[-] istewart@awful.systems 1 points 7 minutes ago

I don’t understand why anyone would think this would ever be possible for LLMs.

Yes, as I understand it, inference requires strictly less computational capacity than training; it's just that a training setup can be turned around and run inference sessions massively in parallel. Just because you can run inference doesn't mean you can accomplish a training run. Unless there's some rationalist super-computer-science I've been missing this whole time...

[-] Architeuthis@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

The “recursive self-improvement” nonsense really baffles me.

That's always been the magic sauce that gives the AI supernatural abilities in rationalist lore, I think they cribbed it from the early singularitarians who had a thing about how when we got our shit together intelligence studying intelligence would lead to an "intelligence explosion", except they replaced the humanity-fuck-yeah aspect with robot fetishism.

this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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