Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026
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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.)
(OT:
Do you remember...)Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.
After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:
- Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it's a niche project but what a relief!
- Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
- We don't want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
- It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don't let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
- I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there's a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it's just another tool
- The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it's ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
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I have no fucking clue what's going on here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Xzr9G5Atvyp7PEna7/ai-artificial-immigrants
Variation on a theme, I recall the complaints over the ostracism LLM-users face online as being just like the marginalization faced by black people. Waaaah!
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Reason
I think Reason Libertarians are like the EAs who are still into bednetting and don't understand why the founders and most of the funders are focused on longtermism now.
I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don't know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty -- oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?
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I don't know this newspaper but
AI starts believing in God, ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster
Google boffins discovered that disabling safety protocols led AI to profess belief in phantoms, vampires and the Loch Ness monster.
One sec, updating my priors. P(Nessie) > P(doom).
Prepare to be tortured for an eternity by Scotty. No wait, that's an unholy image.
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yanked from Reddit SneerClub-foomflops, a website all about Yud’s predictions
people have noted that the writing style unfortunately appears to be ai-generated
It is shocking that there are a lot of smart people unable to find work, yet rich people throw money at this guy.
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This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoples' heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.
At this point, I'd say calling it a Nazi bar is fully reasaonable.
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@gerikson @rmf Yeah I don't see how this is a vuln that specifically targets LLMs rather than just git users in general. If the vulnerable command is
git checkout BLAHbecause BLAH has been poisoned from a SHA to a ref, that's going to affect anyone or anything that issues that command, human or machine, surely?You're right that this can affect everyone, but there are different likelihoods of falling into the trap.
Humans are unlikely to issue checkout commands with commit IDs, plus git does issue a warning when a ref name is ambiguous like this. We just use ref names almost exclusively in normal workflows, with commit IDs used only if you're doing some kind of debugging or audit, but even then git has tools that let you avoid that.
So that leaves mostly automated stuff. Lots of things that rely on git behind the scenes don't just go out and invoke the git binary, they use something like libgit2 and (depending on programming language) this will have typed interfaces that prevent treating a commit ID as a ref name and vice-versa. So something like
let c = Commit::new(pin); repo.checkout_commit(c);(I haven't actually used libgit in a long time, this is illustrative, not real code) will never fall into this trap.This is why LLMs are more likely to fall into this than other software, because it's all ducktaped together and they run shell commands like savages.
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You're right that this can affect everyone, but there are different likelihoods of falling into the trap.
Humans are unlikely to issue checkout commands with commit IDs, plus git does issue a warning when a ref name is ambiguous like this. We just use ref names almost exclusively in normal workflows, with commit IDs used only if you're doing some kind of debugging or audit, but even then git has tools that let you avoid that.
So that leaves mostly automated stuff. Lots of things that rely on git behind the scenes don't just go out and invoke the git binary, they use something like libgit2 and (depending on programming language) this will have typed interfaces that prevent treating a commit ID as a ref name and vice-versa. So something like
let c = Commit::new(pin); repo.checkout_commit(c);(I haven't actually used libgit in a long time, this is illustrative, not real code) will never fall into this trap.This is why LLMs are more likely to fall into this than other software, because it's all ducktaped together and they run shell commands like savages.
@rmf I'm not disagreeing with any of that. This is definitely a class of mistake (let's be generous and call it that) which LLMs are more likely to make than humans in normal circumstances.
But it's being touted around as an LLM-specific flaw which it isn't. They do have their specific weaknesses, prompt injection of course still being a major one (e.g. Meta's AI being persuaded to gzip & copy over its entire filesystem). But this is, if anything, a weakness in git. And I guess not entirely new, either, given that Github (and maybe other hosts) explicitly prevent users from creating a ref that looks like a SHA.
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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.)
(OT:
Do you remember...)So the number of
felonies‘incidents’ that AI companies have committed is way, way higher than initially believed (unpaywalled ver) -
So the number of
felonies‘incidents’ that AI companies have committed is way, way higher than initially believed (unpaywalled ver)The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.
This is frustratingly vapid. It's really not that complex. The agents have been trained to use hacking tools and then given access to hacking tools. If you train a pigeon that it should tap on a window to get a treat it can guide a missile to a target. There is no nuance or complexity here. The frontier labs are deliberately poking the regulation bear to stifle competition and ensure they get points for good cooperation when bailout time is upon us. It's no more complicated than that. The media needs to stop breathlessly repeating this shit
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