this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2026
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Very impressed with this comment from the creator of the Zig programming language, regarding dealing with AI slop submissions, and generally about LLMs for coding.

I should look into Zig again! Technically, I've always leaned more towards Rust, because I like its more uncompromising approach to safety, while Zig always seemed to me a bit more middle-of-the-road on that. But I've been disappointed about how wide-spread LLM usage has become in Rust circles, I fear that its culture might tip over in favor of slop. (But it's not there yet and I hope it won't happen!)

Anyway, I'm ordering the "Introduction to Zig" book...

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.

Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don't really have to worry about getting a job or anything)

And now, someone tries to "explain" the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pbChvM8xZnKmxaKAa/jackson-wagner-s-shortform?commentId=xjX85Kah6AQNsnHPg

I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv

No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there's no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago
[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Moltbook still going great. Even the enthusiasts are feeling that the shine may have worn off.

eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

So just to clarify: You created a thing that you now realize you can't control, and you can't do anything to secure it, and people that use ClawdBot... err sorry.. @openclaw, are own their own to deal with the consequences?! Did I get that right?

Turns out that combining unsecurable vibe-coded web services with unsecurable chatbots and combining them into an unmoderated public platform can be bad. Also, shrugging off problem reports with “i unno” is a bit of a bad look.

alt text

eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

Hey @openclaw team, can you do something about these malicious skills in your registry, ClawHub? Last night, one user, hightowerSeu, published more than 200 malicious skills. Each of these tricks the user into installing malware

Rajveer @RajveerJolly

Tried to reach out, no response yet. @steipete please address it

Peter Steinberger @steipete

Yeah got any ideas how? There's about 1 Million things people want me to do, I don't have a magical team that verifies user generated content. Can shut it down or people us their brain when finding skills.

Rajveer @RajveerJolly

Sorry homie I don't have any idea either. I understand you have a lot on your plate perhaps some sort of flagging feature could do wonders

Peter Steinberger @steipete

And who reviews the flags? That would be abused right away too

eastside mccarty @eastsidemccarty

So just to clarify: You created a thing that you now realize you can't control, and you can't do anything to secure it, and people that use ClawdBot... err sorry.. @openclaw, are own their own to deal with the consequences?! Did I get that right?

Rajveer @RajveerJolly

I hear you. I guess for now people just need to double and check and verify it all bevause there isn't a simple solution to this

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago
[–] nfultz@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

Emails Show Even Epstein Thought Crypto Pumps are Unethical | Gizmodo

Crossover month for the epstein extended universe continues...

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here's Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Sour indeed. There are some decent observations in there. He correctly notes that the book is dissing Stalinism specifically. Newspeak never became a real problem and superficially similar phenomena don't mean language is losing its expressive power. And yes, those depictions of working class people have more than a whiff of classism to them.

Then there's a lot of complaining about leftist infighting. It's pretty appropriate for this to be hosted on that site. It's only anti-revisionism if it comes from the Vanguard Party region of Marxism-Leninism, otherwise it's just sparkling sectarianism.

The communists, who were the best organised, won out and Orwell had to leave Spain, for he was convinced that if he did not, he would be killed

Better organized than the POUM, I'll give it that. "Won out" is an interesting choice of words to describe any republican faction in the Spanish civil war.

And then there's the cringe. No robots and computer? My stories have robots and computer because it's impossible for someone to always pay attention to spying a bunch of people. The panopticon doesn't work, actually, because even if at anytime someone could be watching you, they couldn't possibly be watching you all the time unless they have robots and computer. Also why isn't this dystopian society more feminist?

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

There's a letter in the book of Asimov's correspondence that his brother edited where Asimov says that he'd been asked "How close are we to George Orwell's 1984?" again and again in the years leading up to 1984, to the point that he was sick of it and dreading the actual year 1984, when no one would ask him about anything else. I figure he had a lot of venom built up in his system that came out here.

He was also a veteran of science-fiction fan club drama, after which he worked in academia, so yeah, he knew sectarian in-fighting.

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[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

new odium symposium episode. this one is a lot lighter than the previous two. we went back and looked at joseph swetnam, the guy the word misogyny was coined to describe, and how he got relentlessly dunked on by his peers.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/9-first-149546072, or on any platform

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (8 children)

The whole federation loves nolto.social, an open source, federated alternative to linkedin! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the noto.social is vibe-coded

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

They are organizing another Inkhaven in April, maybe because it brings in at least $80,000. I do not recommend committing to spend a month in the presence of our dear friends given their practice of allowing sexual, psychological, and substance abuse in their communities!

https://www.inkhaven.blog/

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

Requiem for a film-maker: Darren Aronofsky’s AI revolutionary war series is a horror | The Guardian

On This Day has already made headlines for being a little bit of a cop-out, since all the voices are performed by human actors, who presumably needed to feed their families more than they wanted to protect their profession from annihilation. And this is telling, because these voices are by far the most convincing part of On This Day, especially when deployed in voiceover, because then you aren’t distracted by the way the movement of their mouths doesn’t quite match up with the noises coming out of them.

Too bad, I liked about half of his films, esp The Wrestler.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago (3 children)

YCombinator will let founders accept payments in butts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46875033

[–] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)
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[–] istewart@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago

Hmm, we already tried the thing where a bunch of startups have their cash on deposit with a couple of normal, FDIC-insured banks that had grossly mismatched duration in their capital structures. I wonder how this will play out

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (12 children)

Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review

Edit it has garnered one comment so far

Thank you for the service you have valiantly rendered to us all, by making our own reading of these books unnecessary.

You know what? I don't think Proust would have disagreed with having rats avoid his novel.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and I'm confused as to why the reviewer refers to

My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation

which doesn't really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations

Not that it matters much in the end.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I’d chalk it up to the LWer inability to a) summarise and/or summarise accurately, and/or b) LLM usage.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago (5 children)
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[–] lurker@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

following up the previous thread about Eliezer in the Epstein files, he’s responded on reddit

EDIT: this sneer has been deemed important enough for its own post so feel free to sneer there too

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] lurker@awful.systems 9 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I might be crossing a line into conspiracy theory nut over here, but is it weird that both this and his response to the zizzian’s rape allegations have undertones of “i don’t know/im not completely sure”??

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 6 months ago

It's possible it just means the responses aren't vetted by a lawyer, and will be revised as neccessary.

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