this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025

22 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

2219 readers

161 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

dgerard@awful.systems

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th August 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

223 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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 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.

Previous week

(page 3) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

Can anyone explain to me why tf do promptfondlers hate GPT5 in non-crazy terms? Actually I have a whole list of questions related to this, I feel like I completely lost any connection to this discourse at this point:

Is GPT5 "worse" in any sensible definition of the word? I've long complained that there is no good scientific metric to grade those on but like, it can count 'r's in "strawberry" so I thought it's supposed to be nominally better?
Why doesn't OpenAI simply allow users to use the old model (4o I think?) It sounds like the simplest thing to do.
Do we know if OpenAI actually changed something? Is the model different in any interesting way?
Bonus question: what the fuck is wrong with OpenAI's naming scheme? 4, then 4o? And there's also o4 that's something else??

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

from what i can tell people who roleplayed bf/gf with the idiot box aka grew parasocial relationship with idiot box did that on 4o, and now they can't make it work on 5 so they got big mad
i think it's only if they pay up 200$/mo, previously it was probably available at lower tiers
yeah they might have found a way to blow money faster somehow https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-5-power-consumption-could-be-as-much-as-eight-times-higher-than-gpt-4-research-institute-estimates-medium-sized-gpt-5-response-can-consume-up-to-40-watt-hours-of-electricity ed zitron says also that while some of prompt could be cached previously it looks like it can't be done now because there's fresh new thing that chooses model for user, while some of these new models are supposedly even heavier. even that openai intention seemed to be compute savings, because some of that load presumably was to be dealt with using smaller models

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (5 children)

UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought

The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.

[–] BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

Every email you don't delete is another dead fish, or another pasture unwatered. That promotional offer sent to your inbox that you ignored but did not dispose of means creeks will run dry. That evite for a party thrown by an acquaintance you don't particularly like that you did not drop into the trash means a marathon runner will go thirsty as the nectar of life so required is absent, consumed instead by the result of your inbox neglect.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It gets worse, as the advisory doesn't even mention to delete emails/pictures from the cloud, so the people who are likely to listen to these kinds of advices are also the people who are the least likely to understand why this is a bad idea and will delete their local stuff. (And that is ignoring that opening your email/gallery to delete stuff costs more than keeping it in storage where it isn't accessed).

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-drought-group-meets-to-address-nationally-significant-water-shortfall

"HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME

Install a rain butt [hehehe] to collect rainwater to use in the garden.
... [other advice removed]
Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems."

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Dan Olson finds a cursed subreddit:

R/aitubers is all the entitlement of NewTubers but exclusively for people openly churning out slop.

“I’ve automated 2-4 videos daily, zero human intervention, I spend a half hour a week working on this, why am I not getting paid yet?”

The original reddit post:

I’ve been running my YouTube channel for about 3 months. It’s focused on JavaScript and React tutorials, with 2–4 videos uploaded daily. The videos are fully automated (AI-generated with clear explanations, code demos, and screen recordings).

Right now:

Each video gets only a few views (1–10 views).

I tried Google Ads ($200 spent) → got ~20 subscribers and ~20 hours of watch time.

The Google campaigns brought thousands of uncounted views, and the number of Likes was much higher than dislikes.

Tried Facebook/Reddit groups → but most don’t allow video posting, or posts get very low engagement.

My goal is to reach YPP within 6 months, but the current pace is not enough. I’m investing about $300/month in promotion and I can spend 30 minutes weekly myself.

👉 What would you suggest as the most effective strategy to actually get there?

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

I decided to look deeper into that subreddit, and I found the most utterly cursed sentence I've read all week (coming from the aptly-titled "Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn't)"):

If that doesn't sum up everything wrong with AI sloppers in a single sentence, I don't know what does.

EDIT: Incorrectly claimed it came from "My Unethical Strategy to Hit 4000 Hours Watch Time in 40 Days" - fixed that now.

load more comments (2 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (7 children)

https://bsky.app/profile/iwriteok.bsky.social/post/3lwcvfzwjuc23

Robert Evans quoteskeeting dgerard's mic drop

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more direct interaction between my "watching the far-right like heavily armed chimpanzees in a zoo" podcast circles and our techtakes sneerspace. Zitron's work on Better Offline is great, obviously, but I've been listening through QAA, for example, and their discussions of AI and its implications could probably benefit from a better technical grounding.

You love to see it, though.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (6 replies)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Anyways, personal sidenote/prediction: I suspect the Internet Archive’s gonna have a much harder time archiving blogs/websites going forward.

Me, two months ago

Looks like I was on the money - Reddit's began limiting what the Internet Archive can access, claiming AI corps have been scraping archived posts to get around Reddit's pre-existing blocks on scrapers. Part of me suspects more sites are gonna follow suit pretty soon - Reddit's given them a pretty solid excuse to use.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

It sucks how much of the usefulness of the internet is being trashed by this.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

New Blood in the Machine about GPT-5's dumpster fire launch: GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

"usecase" is a cursed term. It's an inverted fnord that lets the reader know that whatever follows can be safely ignored.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

Palantir's public relations team explains how it helped America win the Global War on Terror

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894910

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago

If I ever get the urge to start a website for creatives to sell their media, please slap me in the face and remind me it will absolutely not be worth it.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This was discussed last week but I looked at the comments and noticed someone in the comments getting slammed for... checks notes... noting that Eliezer wasn't clear on what research paper he was actually responding to (multiple other comments are kind of confused, because they assume he means one paper then other comments correct them that he obviously meant another). The commenter of course edits to back-peddle.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

New piece from Brian Merchant, about the growing power the AI bubble's granted Microsoft, Google, and Amazon: The AI boom is fueling a land grab for Big Cloud

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments