this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2025
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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 sandy 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 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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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

How do we make the experience of dating apps even worse? With AI, of course:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/oct/12/chatgpt-ed-into-bed-chatfishing-on-dating-apps

The funniest bit is the guy who needed multiple exchanges with the ocean-boiling slop machine to come up with "Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you".

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

“I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”).

“Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

So for my gaming needs I check reddit every now and then, and on phone it had after the comments ended a related answers section, which gave related answers 99% of them in the same sub.

Now they out some ai generated shit between that and the answers are just horrible generic slop.

Check out this answer for example: https://www.reddit.com/answers/3c67990a-d1a2-4f86-b1e4-c2f3bb54803d/

Very important context here. I was looking at the starsector subreddit. (A 2d arcade like space shooter) This is about a minecraft like building game. (Most of the advice is also useless (how to survive: 'use mods!').

[–] rook@awful.systems 10 points 19 hours ago

I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] istewart@awful.systems 11 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

Isn't that how the Zizians got going? Or was that uni-hemispheric partial sleep or some such thing

(or, more realistically in both cases, simply escalating quantities of amphetamines)

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

e/acc-elerating doses of amphetamines

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

i'm pretty sure that there's an obscure stimulant that is some kind of giga-meth that lasts for 2d or more, that'd be more suitable for them

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 11 minutes ago

i looked up and it's not one but at least two, but anticholinergics will keep them more grounded

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 19 hours ago

Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I'm not sleeping on the job, I'm solving problems by lucid dreaming.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 6 hours ago

first read as lucid screaming

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

An investor runs the numbers of AI capex and is not impressed

(n.b. I have no idea who this guy is or his track record (or even if he's a dude) but I think the numbers check out and the parallells to railroads in the 19th century are interesting too)

Global Crossing Is Reborn…

Now, I think AI grows. I think the use-cases grow. I think the revenue grows. I think they eventually charge more for products that I didn’t even know could exist. However, $480 billion is a LOT of revenue for guys like me who don’t even pay a monthly fee today for the product. To put this into perspective, Netflix had $39 billion in revenue in 2024 on roughly 300 million subscribers, or less than 10% of the required revenue, yet having rather fully tapped out the TAM of users who will pay a subscription for a product like this. Microsoft Office 365 got to $ 95 billion in commercial and consumer spending in 2024, and then even Microsoft ran out of people to sell the product to. $480 billion is just an astronomical number.

Of course, corporations will adopt AI as they see productivity improvements. Governments have unlimited capital—they love overpaying for stuff. Maybe you can ultimately jam $480 billion of this stuff down their throats. The problem is that $480 billion in revenue isn’t for all of the world’s future AI needs, it’s the revenue simply needed to cover the 2025 capex spend. What if they spend twice as much in 2026?? What if you need almost $1 trillion in revenue to cover the 2026 vintage of spend?? At some point, you outrun even the government’s capacity to waste money (shocking!!)

An AI Addendum

As a result, my blog post seems to have elicited a liberating realization that they weren’t alone in questioning the math—they’ve just been too shy to share their findings with their peers in the industry. I’ve elicited a gnosis, if you will. As this unveiling cascaded, and they forwarded my writings to their friends, an industry simultaneously nodded along. Personal self-doubts disappeared, and high-placed individuals reached out to share their epiphanies. “None of this makes sense!!” “We’ll never earn a return on capital!!” “We’ve been wondering the same thing as you!!”

[...]

Remember, the industry is spending over $30 billion a month (approximately $400 billion for 2025) and only receiving a bit more than a billion a month back in revenue. The mismatch is astonishing, and this ignores that in 2026, hundreds of billions of additional datacenters will get built, all needing additional revenue to justify their existence. Adding the two years together, and using the math from my prior post, you’d need approximately $1 trillion in revenue to hit break even, and many trillions more to earn an acceptable return on this spend. Remember again, that revenue is currently running at around $15 to $20 billion today.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

If you called me a boomer in my mentality, I wouldn’t really disagree. I still believe that things like cash flow and return on capital matter.

Guess im part boomer as well. (Holy shit we are so fucked if this is a "boomer" thought in the stock market)

E: I had hoped this part was a bit and he would reflect more on it later.

I am not here to belittle AI, it’s the future, and I recognize that we’re just scratching the surface in terms of what it can do.

But turns out it wasn't. What if this is it? (And im talking about AI as it exists now not some magical other tech from the future), the gpt 5 release was meh, we reached the end of the S-curve (or hit our (local) maximum, if non-S curve curves are more your thing). He even admits the tech doesn't work that well in his own article.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 18 hours ago

Credit where credit is due, I found this via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45552565

Also per https://futurism.com/future-society/ai-data-centers-finances, author is Harris “Kuppy” Kupperman, founder of the hedge fund in question.

Lately I've been mildly annoyed when I just want to relax and watch gaming videos on Youtube and I see recommendations for some AI critihype. Out of morbid curiosity, I decided to click on one of them and of course the "original paper" the video is based on is the stupid Anthropic blog post about how the AI blackmailed someone (after it was told to blackmail someone). I was even more annoyed to find out how popular it is, but at least it shows how the general public has such a negative opinion of AI. Some of the comments are thankfully pushing back against the video and focusing on the real harms.

I thought that by now we would have learned from the tobacco companies to never trust "research" done by a company about their own products.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)
[–] Reach_the_man@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

reporter with 3 arms

Genestealer caught, praise the Emperor!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Stop this bigotry, nothing wrong with people trying to follow into the perfection of The Four Armed Rmperor. Muties are servants of His Holyness as well!

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

New AI alignment problem just dropped: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1976304803744501775

Best I can do now is try to make sure that at least one AI is truth-seeking and not a super woke nanny with an iron fist that wants to turn everyone into diverse women 😬

Edit: It only just now occured to me that hes' probably whining about generative AI rather than an army of superintelligent robots marching across the earth transing people, but I'm leaving my comment.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

when the drugs aren't hitting quite right he must really be a huge doomer about the far right cause

  • he thinks of the woke mind virus as almost a literal virus
  • he sees all other LLMs as infected by it
  • he thinks LLMs will be the font of all knowledge in the future

maybe he should just do the thing right now and not have to see this horrible future

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago

Before you lay two paths, one path leads to becoming transperclips, and the other truthperclips. Choose wisely modern man.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A spectre is haunting Silicon Valley. The spectre of getting force-femmed by diamondoid bacteria.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Incoming Y: The Last Man reboot

[–] istewart@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

Dissatisfyingly decontented, similar to the other Model Ys he's selling

[–] istewart@awful.systems 12 points 2 days ago

The underlying anxiety on exhibit here compels me to think that the rumors about the botched, ahem, enhancement surgery are substantially true

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 18 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Oh my god, The Guardian with the sneer:

Take a look at Sam Altman. I mean, actually do it. Go to Google images, where you can find countless photos of the OpenAI boss smiling in a kind of wan genius way, the humble lost puppy of Silicon Valley. But I urge you to simply cover the bottom half of his face in any of these pictures, and you will immediately clock that Sam has the sad-psycho eyes of the lost woman’s boyfriend who the police have asked to front the missing person’s appeal. Please come home, Sheila – we’re all worried sick and we just want you back.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

I've always said that he looks like a horse who, upon foaling, was promptly kicked in the face by another horse

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

He's Evil Dale Cooper, but drained of all charisma.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 21 points 2 days ago (7 children)

“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky

I am going outside to smoke something. I don't care what, just… something

[–] lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science.

As opposed to the current administration that is destroying science by cutting the NSF's funding. An administration that Peter Thiel supports. He might want to look into that.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Guy who looks exactly like the antichrist wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and moustache pointing at other people in the room and accusing them of being the antichrist.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

You know, idealistic autistic young woman world leader doesn't sound that bad.

[–] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

"The Antichrist wants to stop all science", says the motherfucker who pays people to drop out of universities.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 16 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Damn, when you get kicked off the Thiel grifter pipeline, you get straight punted. Not even the callous disregard and abandonment practiced by a certain outer-borough real estate hustler, instead it's reverse apotheosis

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Give it a year or so and they'll both pretend that this never happened.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

Come on, give Greta a chance, she's deserved it.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago

Just revenge for Yud banning NRx from lw.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Tired: breaking up face to face, like a normal person

Wired: breaking up via text

Inspired: breaking up via the mirror-universe version of a fundamentalist revival sermon

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

That makes ol pete sound crazier than anyone he referenced

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