Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025

https://awful.systems/post/6006438

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th October 2025 - awful.systems

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.)

Simon Willison writes a fawning blog post about the new “Claude skills” (which are basically files with additional instructions for specific tasks for the bot to use)

How does he decide to demonstrate these awesome new capabilities?

By making a completely trash, seizure inducing GIF…

simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/claude-skills/

He even admits it’s garbage. How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise? Even the big slop monger companies manage to cherry pick their demos.

Just felt like I got an aneurysm there.

(in unrelated things, first)

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …

Simon Willison’s Weblog

How do you even get to the point that you think that’s something you want to advertise?

Man’s spent several years and shitloads of cash destroying his public image (and probably his brain) via slop bots, I suspect he’s getting desperate to prove his LLM booster turn wasn’t a career-ruining blunder

(He’s also probably lost the ability to tell good work from bad work as well - that’s a universal quality among slop advocates, as Gerard has pointed out on multiple occasions)

I find absolutely consistently that gen-AI advocates are literally unable to tell good output from bad output. They think people who say their output is garbage are just lying to have a go at them. - awful.systems

xcancel: https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115 [https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1899535387435086115]