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. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)

  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    7 hours ago

    Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI’s ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/

    “They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”

    The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.

    The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap.

    In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    14 hours ago

    Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.

    Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.

    He made a song instead.

    https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d

    Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:

    Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”

    💀

    May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?

    Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.

    Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      17 hours ago

      I mean if he had been willing to grift on it without actually creating anything he probably could have made some decent money in the current environment, but also I’m of the opinion that those folks willing to do that oughta be sent to install that orbital infrastructure by hand without a spacesuit, so probably for the best.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    4·
    22 hours ago

    The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph

    Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.

    Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.

    /why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?

    Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      16 hours ago

      Not sure who Wes Streeting is

      I’d say he is a shitty transphobic blairite labour politician and current cabinet member, but I don’t know how much that narrows things down. He holds a non-trivial amount of political power in the uk. There was a brief moment where it looked like he’d replace keir starmer.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      17 hours ago

      The flag “-dangerously-skip-permissions” sounds like something that would have come out of a joke a few years ago. I wonder what the incredibly predictable consequences of encouraging everyone to do something that has “dangerous” in the goddamn name are going to be.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          52 minutes ago

          If the math teachers start making rap songs about this jargon, and if enough youth pastors emulate it while sitting backward in enough chairs, we might yet kill it dead.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.

    Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.

    https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    Amazing installation instructions at https://github.com/0xeb/ghidrasql

    Install with an AI agent (recommended)

    The fastest way to get ghidrasql running end-to-end is to point an AI coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider, etc.) at the bundled installer prompt:

    install-prompt.md

    It is a self-contained runbook with explicit verification gates at every step — preflight checks, building libghidra, installing the LibGhidraHost Ghidra extension, building ghidrasql, and a first live query. Hand it to your agent and let it drive the install; intervene only if a gate reports a failure.

    JFC.

    h/t to rairii: https://labyrinth.zone/objects/96478395-64d9-452c-a906-9e6159cd10a3

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Worse than the cursed “curl -o- | bash” command installations. Or as I like to call it “curl prostrate”

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Well, you know how everyone went from “do not trust anything you read on wikipedia” to “wikipedia is the last hope for humanity’s knowledge and history”?

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    There was a cryptocurrency wallet hack the other day which has so far gone unremarked here because the popcorn is stale and we all pivoted to AI. And yet there are dozens of voices of bagholders crying out in pain wanting to be heard. This is their story.

    For some reason the best explanation comes from a boring company that makes point of sale credit card readers https://engineering.block.xyz/blog/predictable-rng-fallback-and-32-bit-reseed-in-coldcard-firmware

    COLDCARD firmware contains an RNG integration error that causes ngu.random to use MicroPython’s deterministic Yasmarang fallback instead of the STM32 hardware RNG.

    Oh hey they got the most important thing not to get wrong wrong in the regulation free money settlement layer of the future.

    The bug? Well in one file they wrote #define MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG 0, and a library they depended on had this code:

    # ifndef MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG
# error "get a HW TRNG plz"
# endif

    This should have caused a build failure, but since MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG was defined, to zero, it did not and instead continued down an insecure codepath.

    As a C++ programmer this isn’t an unheard of sort of mistake to make in the moment. Many libraries use undefined for preprocessor variables, but there are some people who also use zero.

    But it’s less excusable to not catch it when this is literally the most important thing to get right in a bitcoin wallet. Did they not trace the code path when writing the code? Did they have no integration tests or unit tests for RNG seed quality? Poor RNG seeding has come up a ton in literature, so is the sort of thing people writing cryptographic code should check for…

    We’ll have to addend that old saying: “don’t roll your own crypto unless the other person’s crypto is from a blockchain developer in which case you’re probably better off rolling your own after all.”

    I personally don’t want to sneer at the bagholders too much here. It’s 2026 and at this point it just feels kinda sad. But I’ll end this comment with this glowing review:

    I thought I was secure because Cold Card was always praised as one of the best and most secure wallets. It’s open source, so anyone can verify.

    “It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      I was gonna link someone else’s observations on it, but got sidetracked by a shiny object or something.

      https://mastodon.catgirl.cloud/@49016/117021988214007605

      They didn’t link the sources, but apparently the all-my-apes-gone twitter crowd are still breathtakingly ignorant of technology and statistics, despite how many years of bitcoin catastrophes have passed.

      Quite a few people suggesting/using dice to mitigate the Coldcard vulnerability.

      Note that common dice are not designed to be cryptographically secure.

      If you are going to do this, you probably should buy precision casino dice. And even then, have another source of entropy.

      Posted entirely unironically, apparently. Hard to say, but Poe’s law has yet t be repealed.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        1 day ago

        New things I think learned from this thread:

        • the thief used a blockchain provider instead of an ad-hoc local node, making all the transactions incredibly traceable with (unclear to me) implications about their ability to launder them or keep their identity concealed indefinitely.

        • even if they are found out, the previous owners probably won’t see a dime back since the vulnerability affects exactly the ability to prove you really were the previous owner.

        Unclear which thief since the web3isdoinggreat writeup says there had been up to 15 unique groups doing mass drains by 31/7, maybe the initial 500 wallet sweep was one person or group?

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        apparently this issue became obvious YEARS AGO since the birthday problem struck a random redditor, who promptly got gaslit that this is completely impossible and it was dismissed. lol. lmao even

        Hahaha

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        2 days ago

        All the dice discourse in particular has made this a fun throwback to the days of crypto bros earnestly arguing about which wall in your house you should hide your hand-stamped seed phrase record inside and whether you could trust a published book of truly random numbers over a series of 256 coin flips. Ironically I can only assume that by the time any of the concerns about entropy sources were validated most of them lost their crypto to some combination of get-richer-quicker ponzi schemes and twitter DMs claiming to definitely be FTX tech support.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      “It’s open source, so anyone can verify” – unfortunately for them the verifier was also a hacker.

      Also, most of the would-be verifiers are frying their brains with AI

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      I’ve been following it a bit, there’s a lot less comedy gold to mine nowadays

      here are some links from another forum

      https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/31/major-bitcoin-wallet-flaw-drains-594-btc-in-25-minute-sweep (crypto shill outfit link)

      https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/31820a53956b53c5/image.png

      https://bitcoinenthusiast.org/uploads/c0804335a52922e4/image.png - this last is attributing to malice what’s clearly stupidity

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    Opinion: I Was Not Allowed To Type Prompts Into ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk And This Is Discrimination By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University

    spoiler

    In the meantime, if any search committees are reading this: I am still available. My research program is innovative and well-structured. I have a clear vision for my independent career.

    It’s saved in a Google Doc that I can share with you. ChatGPT and I worked very hard on it.