Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st November 2026 - awful.systems
awful.systems
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. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

Welcome to November, and 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.)___

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    7 days ago

    so there’s a new nber econometrics paper out, covering our favourite industry

    it has some bangers in it

    Paid adoption is substantially more common among younger and higher-income consumers: those earning more than $200,000 per year are 1.7 times as likely to pay as those earning less than $50,000, and those younger than 55 are 1.8 times as likely as those aged 55 or older

    starting strong!

    This force creates a dynamic incentive to set lower prices today: lower prices attract more users, improving future model quality and raising future demand

    I don’t entirely follow how setting lower prices today improves future model quality but sure I’ll go along with the ride

    Despite this limited horizontal differentiation, we find some degree of vertical differentiation across providers, consistent with observed market shares. At the end of our sample, the average consumer was willing to pay a $10 monthly premium for OpenAI products relative to Anthropic products. Part of this difference reflects model quality: our estimates indicate that consumers are willing to pay more for higher-quality models. For instance, moving from GPT-4’s capability level to GPT-5.5 Pro’s raises average willingness to pay for OpenAI products by approximately $25 per month

    We also use the model to examine how consumer preferences for AI services shape competition. We begin by considering substitutability across services. By the end of our sample, all pairs of AI services are substitutes on average

    “do you want tea or coffee?” “yes”

    OpenAI has the highest retention of all AI products we study, with 77% of people still paying after one month, 65% after three months, and 55% after six months. Anthropic and xAI are lower, but similar to each other: around 65%, 50%, and 40% after one, three, and six months,

    in the words of basement jaxx, down down downdown down downdown downdown

    chat is it good when your world changing ai god keeps not getting picked for anyone’s team during lunch football

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      I don’t entirely follow how setting lower prices today improves future model quality but sure I’ll go along with the ride

      More people using it, more training data fed into it.

      77% of people still paying after one month

      That seems a bit low.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        More people using it, more training data fed into it

        yes but that’s not actually the hard and costly part. the hard and costly part is the actual training action, which runs in the hundred of millions if not more

        which, y’know, when lower prices……

        • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          5 days ago

          Well, they’ve also reached model sizes where scrapes of the entire internet aren’t sufficiently large enough to train the model, so they also need more data. But yeah, they compute cost of actually training the models are prohibitively large.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            5 days ago

            yeah they’re far past public-only sources, there’s more than a few non-public sources going into this shit too. and still it’s not enough to work and sort out the issues! almost as tho the whole thing is a bit of a silly idea

            I’m glad there’s finally some financial reckoning coming, I just hope I’m wrong about how utterly fucking bad it will be

            • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
              3·
              5 days ago

              If that paper about astra being able to make sense of other models’ weights has any merit, at some point they became so desperate they actually started adding serialized open weight models to the training data.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      this combined with the anthropic amended s-1 (which I very briefly dug into here, will dig more later), the numbers are all just about as bad as I’ve been thinking they’d be