Skip Navigation
Trump’s DOJ will no longer prosecute cryptocurrency fraud
  • Sailor Sega Saturn will no longer buy US based stocks! What a coincidence.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Linking this article just for the Palantir CEO quote at the end https://www.wired.com/story/doge-hackathon-irs-data-palantir/

    "We love disruption and whatever is good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir,” Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a February earnings call. “Disruption at the end of the day exposes things that aren't working. There will be ups and downs. This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off."

    This is a revolution, some people are going to get their heads cut off

    Holy smokes

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Talk about annoyingly vague. I read the whole thing and he never actually says what his problem is. I guess like so much classism I'm supposed to fill in the blank or something.

  • AGI Escapes Containment; Trump Admin: "Hold My Beer" — Tariff Terathread
  • To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It's a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn't understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

    The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

    This "Cavallo" reference isn't actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

    Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

    Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. [...] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

    Amazing. The government's official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • Hey wait a minute we already made that (obvious) joke here on Awful Systems!

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th April 2025
  • I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Do you think he knows that "inspired" and "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090" are not the same word?

    Edit: oh no I read the replies.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Don't worry I know (approximately) what I'm getting into and have enough savings to be OK even if things don't work out, and am on good terms with a few Swiss people so won't start out totally isolated. Worst case scenario I can always move back to California but I'm at the point in my life where I want to check out Europe for a change.

    weird german

    When my German teacher told me she can't understand Swiss German I thought "haha I'm in danger".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426

    https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese

    This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.

    お前はもう死んでいる


    Edit: from the English version of this project:

    export type Pronoun = 'I' | 'you' | 'he' | 'she' | 'it' | 'we' | 'they' | 'me' | 'him' | 'her' | 'us' | 'them';

    Ah yes, definitely the only pronouns in all of English

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • To be clear that sentence was about working in Silicon Valley (which has rot of it's own lately) and I've never worked in government.

    But yeah the US government is in more than a bit of danger. If there's anyone who isn't convinced after reading all the headlines then there's no convincing them.

    details

    Some news stories are still saying "could we be heading towards a constitutional crisis?", but meanwhile the government is shipping Venezuelans to a concentration camp in EL Salvadore and making fascist tiktok videos about it, detaining tourists with paperwork snafus for months, threatening multiple countries, dismantling and abusing the civil service, denying transgender people's visas as "fraud", and putting anti-vaxxers in charge of national health.

    I have three siblings and all of us have been impacted by messed up US politics in some way:

    • I, a transgender programmer disillusioned with silicon valley*, don't think things are going to get any better from here and am orchestrating a work transfer to Switzerland. My documentation all has my old name / gender because I didn't think I'd have to be in a hurry to update it, and now I'm worried updating it could lead to complications or delays or worse.

    • My brother who works in medicine was looking for PHDs in the US or Europe, but recently decided Europe would be rather nicer than the US and is moving to Austria

    • My other brother is a librarian in a very republican state that sees him as the enemy. From the covid years you can find a rumble video of someone harassing him over library mask policy.

    • My sister is a researcher, who has had or is at risk of having her grants cut off due to the whole DOG thing.

    * Since I'm taking the work visa route I'll unfortunately be joined at the hip with silicon valley until I get permanent residency.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • Yeah I'm sure DOGE doesn't appreciate that structured programming hasn't always been a thing. There was such a cultural backlash against it that GOTO is still a dirty word to this day, even in code where it makes sense, and people will contort their code's structure to avoid calling it.

    The modernization plan I linked above talks about the difficulty of refactoring in high level terms:

    It is our experience that the cycle of workarounds adds to our total technical debt – the amount of extra work that we must do to cope with increased complexity. The complexity of our systems impacts our ability to deliver new capabilities. To break the cycle of technical debt, a fundamental, system-wide replacement of code, data, and infrastructure is required

    While I've never dealt with COBOL I have dealt with a fair amount of legacy code. I've seen a ground up rewrites go horribly horribly due to poor planning (basically there were too many office politics involved and not enough common sense). I think either incremental or ground up can make sense, but you just have to figure out what makes sense for the given system (and even ground up rewrites should be incremental in some respects).

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th March 2025
  • The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

    The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

    “This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

    SSN's pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:

    SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.

    What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:

    You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.

    Bonus -- Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i

  • Gemini 2.5 "reasoning", no real improvement on river crossings.
  • All along my mistake was that I was prompting it in unicode instead of latin1, alphameric BCD, or "modified UTF-8".

  • Orange site censoring posts left and right as US descends further into fascism
  • I suppose it'd be Regeln sind Regeln in German, though I don't know if that's an actual saying there or not.

    I just started learning German recently* and so far it's a lovely language. I've already noticed how similar Dutch is just from browsing Wiktionary. Wiktionary is great because it has a declension / conjugation chart for every word I've tried -- a lot of dictionaries kind of assume you already know the grammar basics.

    * As part of some in-progress US exit plans I'm not ready to talk about just yet because they might still fall through

  • Orange site censoring posts left and right as US descends further into fascism
  • OK hate reading this thread now:

    spoiler

    I wouldn’t describe them [Border Patrol] as nationalistic or fascist. There’s no need to bring in any sort of political view…

    Heck this guy for downplaying fascism

    This is how American immigration has always worked.

    Heck this guy for downplaying the recent totally obvious escalations

    Immigration enforcement isn't pretty anywhere, but also happens everywhere. For instance literally every single story of somebody being detained/deported from anywhere for working without a work permit is going to be a sad story

    Heck this guy for normalizing what's going on

    You mean those few hundred gang bangers that were brutal enough that even their home countries wouldn't accept them back?

    Heck this guy for trusting, unconditionally, the feds when they claim people without criminal backgrounds (but omg tattoos) are hardened violent criminals.

    So the Canadien was deported for illegally being in the USA, got caught and deported, and then got caught again for illegally entering the USA again?

    Heck this guy for being generally oblivious to that horror story that was all over the news

    On the other is the story, which may or may not be clickbait intended as outrage-engagement.

    Heck this guy for being willfully obtuse

    It says clearly in the article that she violated the terms of her visa according to ICE. Her parents never mention what the violation was. The idea she was deported for doing some chores around the house is laughable.

    Heck this guy for not choosing kindness

    Well, the unfortunate tourist lady was taken into custody for a suspicion to attempt to work illegally as a house help. Not sure why her family panic so much, as they live in UK, when you can go in chains for posting something on twitter or liking "inappropriate" content

    Heck this guy for not choosing kindness

  • Orange site censoring posts left and right as US descends further into fascism
  • "high-indignation, high-intensity hot topics [...] intensely held, pre-existing positions" "not a curious conversation"

    Yeah to hell with this guy. Calling this a "hot topic" and "not a curious conversation" as if it were in the same realm as tan suits and cybertrucks is a huge disservice, especially given how complicit Silicon Valley has been in all this.

    I don't know if y'all have seen the video the US government put out showing off their extrajudicial human rights abuses, but seriously consider skipping it. It's dark dark Nazi shit. The most disturbing thing I've seen in my life and I wish I hadn't seen it.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd March 2025
  • Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast he's been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.

    I guess this all makes sense if he's going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it won't work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.

    If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone I'd text back "Thanks for the e-waste :<" but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.

  • Tiny3D - High-Res Textures [N64 Homebrew]
  • People have done some wild stuff with the N64 in recent years and it's great. Have you seen the guy who's been working on optimizing Mario 64 for the past 4 years and improved the performance by like over 600%?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd March 2025
  • I demand that Brown University fire (checks notes) first name "YOU ARE HACKED NOW" last name "YOU ARE HACKED NOW" immediately!

  • Ilya Sutskever's new AI super-intelligence startup raises a billion dollars. Unclear what they actually do.

    https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/

    http://web.archive.org/web/20240904174555/https://ssi.inc/

    I have nothing witty or insightful to say, but figured this probably deserved a post. I flipped a coin between sneerclub and techtakes.

    They aren't interested in anything besides "superintelligence" which strikes me as an optimistic business strategy. If you are "cracked" you can join them:

    > We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.

    23
    www.eurogamer.net Olympics ditched Mario & Sonic series to explore NFTs and esports

    The International Olympics Committee walked away from its partnership with Nintendo and Sega for the long-running Mario…

    Olympics ditched Mario & Sonic series to explore NFTs and esports

    Saw the title and knew I had to post here. Not quite as big of a self-own as Square selling Tomb Raider for a blockchain / AI pivot; but amusing nonetheless.

    > Join the excitement of the Olympic Games Paris 2024 with nWay's officially licensed, commemorative Paris 2024 NFT Digital Pin collection! > > You can claim a legendary or epic pin showcasing the Paris 2024 mascot holding a flag and waving. You can add these digital gems to your collection through Magic Eden’s friendly NFT marketplace as part of Coinbase's Onchain Summer event. Be sure to have an ETH L2 Base-supported wallet to secure yours today!

    Remember when companies let you download wallpapers or something instead of figuring out what the heck an ETH L2 Base-supported wallet is?

    I remember.

    2
    OpenAI vs. Elon Musk 2 - Whoever wins, we lose
    openai.com OpenAI and Elon Musk

    We are dedicated to the OpenAI mission and have pursued it every step of the way.

    OpenAI and Elon Musk

    Follow up to https://awful.systems/post/1109610 (which I need to go read now because I completely overlooked this)

    Now OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk's lawsuit with an email dump containing a bunch of weird nerd startup funding drama: https://openai.com/blog/openai-elon-musk

    Choice quote from OpenAI:

    > As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).

    OpenAI have learned how to redact text properly now though, a pity really.

    6
    Bitconeeect

    OK OK old news I know. But this is a metal cover of a bitconnect speech that I found pretty amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ-Ayj-ht_I

    8
    openai.com Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

    We’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large language model (LLM) could aid someone in creating a biological threat.&nbsp;In an evaluation involving both biology experts and students, we found that GPT-4 provides at most a mild uplift in biological threat creation accuracy. Whil...

    Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

    OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/building-an-early-warning-system-for-llm-aided-biological-threat-creation

    Orange discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39207291

    I don't have any particular section to call out. May post thoughts tomorrow today it's after midnight oh gosh, but wanted to post since I knew ya'll'd be interested in this.

    Terrorists could use autocorrect according to OpenAI! Discuss!

    98
    Buttcoin Classic - Zuckerberg's Music Videos

    #1 We're All Gonna Make It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0diaVLPrQ

    #2 Ethereum: https://www.facebook.com/randizberg/videos/nobodyme-ok-heres-another-music-video-had-a-blast-on-this-collab-with-hila-the-k/531145045349722/

    #3 Hello This Is Defi: https://twitter.com/randizuckerberg/status/1494416366710910992

    Surgeon General's Warning: watching all of these back to back may make your brain ooze out of your nose.

    1
    Hacker News on Homeschooling quickly veers into transphobia

    Don't mind me I'm just here to silently scream into the void

    Edit: I'm no good at linking to HN apparently, made link more stable.

    10
    sailor_sega_saturn Sailor Sega Saturn @awful.systems

    I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence... Sailor Saturn.

    Posts 7
    Comments 556