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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026 (awful.systems)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [M] to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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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.

last week's edition

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[–] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 child)

Am I right in understanding that almost all the big name results in LLM-derived math recently come from big publicity projects in which someone spent ungodly amounts of money to have the thing nondeterministically fuzz huge numbers random seeds leading to independent random outputs around a topic, putting out simulacra of ideas which could be then deterministically algorithmically checked? In fields where something like finding one counterexample to a conjecture would be a big deal, or where you just need to try a huge number of possible solutions until you happen to hit on one that works, rather than follow a long train of logic?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Among the three big results I've looked at (unit distance problem, cycle double cover, Jacobian), two were counterexamples and one of them had a short 3 page proof using ideas from the 1970s. The Jacobian conjecture is an extreme case because a single counterexample is enough (for unit distance, you technically need a family of counterexamples), and it is easy to check with very basic computations. It is telling that all of these announcements came from OpenAI or Anthropic employees, who presumably have unlimited access to their AI. Nobody really knows how many resources they spent on this, or what else they tried. Nobody really seems to care about this question, either.

    I think there is a phenomenon where supposedly hard questions are much easier than expected, because by chance nobody found the right approach for a while, and eventually it becomes famous as a "hard problem" which makes nobody want to attempt it.

    What I'm more worried about is many people starting to use AI to try and prove small lemmas for them in their projects. Of course, a $200/mo subscription is absolutely necessary to them. This honestly feels like a repeat of Claude Code back in February. The software engineers eventually realized that AI is absurdly expensive after the AI companies realized that spending $14000/mo to service a $200/mo subscription is a bad idea. If the AI vendors couldn't squeeze money out of rich software companies, what exactly are they gonna get out of poor mathematicians and universities? Also, there is the cognitive decline caused by overuse of LLMs that has yet to set in.

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