Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Kicking off the sack with something light.
I see RicksCEO.eth has since quietly removed the “.eth” part of his name. Presumably it was way more embarrassing than being a strip club tycoon.
Headcanon: he changed it as a result of this epic bonnie slam
it looks like checkmarks retailated
unlike Rick, she did get laid
some years ago I wanted to build a bot that tracks all these loons, but the twitter API reqs are onerous as fuck so I never bothered
feel like there’s probably still a need for something like that. perhaps even more so than before, given how mask-off the snakepit is getting
Considering API access is now I think 40k a month + you pay for usage, prob good you never got into that. So the time doesn’t feel wasted.
Godspeed, Bonnie. I’m gonna call this a good omen for the week.
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop
this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious
if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.
Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there’s people who don’t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they’re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.
“socialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsides”
Weird way to say he doesn’t talk to many women
eigen “Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee” robot
Oh but you see it’s not regressive because it’s polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermensch’s children
almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
Oh, he’s apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197
Knowing the context doesn’t really change anything about this tweet though.
why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
Status. Also just a bit of kink and ‘proving’ heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).
I’ve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
eigen “I’ll call it ironic if people call me on my shit” robot
I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.
Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.
i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty
it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you
…I feel like there’s a story here.
camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.
my current box is the descendant of that one
this is what the cloud and its enshittification has taken from us
shared root on ad-hoc hardware doing fuck knows what (but it’s probably lemonparty)
these days lemonparty would be a (ahahahaha) docker image (fnarr etc)
did y’all see bash.org looks to maybe finally have died died? there’s an archive up somewhere at least but rip to a bastion
(this thought comes to mind because I instantly wanted to link “our thoughts go out to the recent victims of internet fraud”…)
A couple months ago I lobbied for (and won) my weekly trivia team to use the name “mike’s hard lemonparty”
Then I learned exactly how old I was
Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:
We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?
from someone on Mastodon:
Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.
If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.
I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.
I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation
(promotion driven dev)
Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.
oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit
that’s quite appealing to me ngl
God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.
Boss needs you to find the contiguous subarray with the maximum sum. Says he needs it by EOB Friday.
Here ya go boss, a 80% prototype solution.
/* TODO: support other element types */ unsigned int * maxsumsubarr(unsigned int arr[], size_t len, size_t * sublen) { *sublen = len; return arr; }
Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.
Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”
If the purpose of a metric is to show adoption, the metric can be defined in a way to show adoption. Could be just an effect of promo driven culture, AI push and good’ol Goodhart’s law.
Like, how do you even measure when code is ai authored and when not. If you insert 25% of a variable name and the autocompleter guesses the rest of the name correctly, are the remaining 75% AI generated?
appparently this is use of code-complete as well
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.
which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)
At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.
The reason I think it was a freebie is:
- Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
- Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
- Cyberpunk
20222077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch
It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.
Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻♂️
but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity
honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics
to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base
iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it’d be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn’t work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn’t
it’ll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday
NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle’s latest video “Big Tech is Going Nuclear!” (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it’s an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant “well, done with you” - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I’m sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people
The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
The term “AI” damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.
I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction’s coming true.
Ok, but are you suggesting he was duped?
The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying but I’d really have to stretch my benefit-of-the-doubt muscles to consider someone who makes such well-researched videos wouldn’t go to the website before he reads the url out on his video and see that on the homepage, above the fold, in big letters, it says “Powered by AI”
maybe reach out and ask? might be interesting to see the answer
(if you care to, anyway)
It’s definitely the prudent option but I’m over mental capacity and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sharing this just for the upvotes. I couldn’t see any mentions of the sponsor in the comments, so I guess the audience, at least, were duped. I already have a string of unanswered questions on ecosia’s greenwashing social posts, though
yep, I getcha.
sorry if my reply sounded rude. I didn’t mean it to be. I just saw it again and it sounds dismissive.
And this puts the bit from the other video with the referral links into context. It’s not a joke, he actually expects to be making money off of people :(. I found the vagueness in the ad jarring too. There’s this thing called sponsorblock, a database of timestamps for videos that skips useless stuff. The downside is you don’t find out if the guy that you’re watching is a shill.
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said… this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.
The new self-checkout process is as follows:
- Scan your item
- Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
- Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
- Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
- GOTO 1
Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.
I call this the law of conservation of complexity
sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)
I wonder when the management will figure out these rigid anti theft systems cost a lot more than they save.
On that note, think i figured out a way to get free products on the lidl checkout. There was a large amount of errors (some of which caused by me by accident). And required help a couple of times and later i realized that i had paid less than expected. Not sure if it is reproducable, as that would be stealing, or trying to get hired as a red teamer.
A woman was scheduled to give a talk at an AI conference. The organizers run her photo through an AI image expansion program to get the aspect-ratio right (how did we ever manage to show photos of speakers before AI existed?).
The AI image expansion invents a bra / undershirt which wasn’t visible in the original photo.
This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didn’t notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. It’s funny in a disgusting way.
I’d like to imagine that Adobe/other AI photo editing people are frantically scrambling to fondle their prompts a little harder to avoid things like this. Infinite whack-a-mole.
I wonder if Adobe has considered cooling their new data centers with liquid nitrogen?
Cold is key to successful turd polishing.
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.
That fucking sucks, esp as you put a lot of time into it.
oof :x
what’s the next step on that?
Ugh, from me as well: sorry to hear that.
I can relate to how you feel about the AI stuff. I also work for GenAI-pilled upper management, and the forced introduction of github copilot is coming soon. It will make us all super extra productive! …they say. Dreading it already. I won’t use it at all, I’ve already made that clear to my superior. But my colleagues might use it, and then I will have to review the AI slop… uggghh…
Maybe a small silver lining to raise the mood here, recent article from Monday: Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges
If even freaking Gartner is now saying “well, maybe AI is too expensive and not actually so useful”… then maybe the world of management will wisen up as well, soon, hopefully, maybe?
an idea I just had (which would need some work but talking hypothetical): wouldn’t it be lovely if
IDEsVS Code[0] automatically inserted “Copilot Used Here” start/end markers around all generated shit. could even make it a styleguide/editorconfig so it’s universally set across projects[1][0] - because lol ofc it’s mainly vscode rn
[1] - and then when you find colleagues who lie about whether they’re using it you wrap all their desk shit in foil
I like the idea. Or maybe marking such changes in the commit message… I might try to bring that up when the time comes.
in the current most-typical mode of engagement, commit messages are too disconnected from the actual contents. it requires someone who gives a shit to go looking
conversely, what I mean is something like “a hook that guarantees that the moment the plugin is engaged and output from it is scribed in source, metadata about that event is simultaneously co-written”
it’s already generating a pile of other things, it may as well generate timestamps and callsig and callhash and shit too…
the number one problem with this, of course, is that it’s going to be extremely unpopular with a Vocal Set Of People who rely on this shit to make themselves look good
I’m really sorry. I know how frustrating all of this bullshit is. Here for you. <3
Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
no escape
Rest of world: is there no alternative to US hegemony?
CIA: *raises head from pile of blow, puts gun on table* no
It’s more like everyone is hungry for content and the POTUS election is a big generator of it.
Also most of us speak a lot of English so it is easier to follow than for example Mandarin.
…and other examples of why there are no alternatives to US hegemony!
Ok actually read the screed. Ahhhh yes good ol’ Jeff “In the years after I bought the WaPo and everyone got suspicious, me and my billions of dollars have done nothing but improve the world and my credibility and definitely didn’t trap anyone in warehouses to die in a tornado, so you all trust me now, right?” Bezos
Broke: Simpsons did it first
Woke: OJ Simpson did it first
Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.
I wonder what major world events were happening in the 1930s-1940s that would line up with this…
As it turned out, Meyer did take the side of the Republican party on some issues. He was opposed to FDR’s New Deal, and this was reflected in the Post’s editorial stance as well as its news coverage, especially regarding the National Recovery Administration (NRA). He even wrote an editorializing “news” story under a fake name
THERE IT IS!
But back to Jeff.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.
Yep. We’re protected from intimidation and extortion so long as we pay our dues to the consiglieri when he comes around and don’t get too chummy with the cops.
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
(e: not blaming you, just posting from outside hell)
For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:
https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397
Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.
Electric Wizard 🤝Donald Trump
“Legalize Drugs & Murder”Truly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.
Quite the proof he no longer writes his own tweets. Fun fact seems like they created various freerossdayone cryptocurrency tokens, who are all doing badly (according to my quick google) he has lost the mandate of heaven.
russian dude generates botslop on dating apps, makes 5000+ girls talk to bot, chooses the one that stayed with chatgpt: https://xcancel.com/biblikz/status/1752335415812501757#m
The entire motivation of AI dev afaict is to have a new mommy to take care of you, I guess this is one way to do it. 🙄🙄🙄
Ok so I read the thread as translated by google. Some notes:
- System was set up to also use some image recognition so it could filter for some classic incel-type shit, like:
- believers
- zodiac sign written
- doesn’t work
- show breasts in photos
- photos with flowers
- His entire correspondence with these women was done by chatgpt. including making dates and promising gifts for those dates. He later gives gpt calendar access to avoid a two dates to the prom situation.
- Did he continue using gpt to talk to his fiance? yes. Did he feign responsiveness in his texting with gpt? also yes. When she started talking about going to weddings, did it generate a marriage proposal out of the blue, and prompt him as to whether or not the message should be sent? also yes.
just… fuck.
Horrifying, also it is obvious how much they dont like women. Talking to people you care about shouldn’t be a chore
Yeah. Why even try dating if you hate women this much? JFC.
horrifying
bet tesla didn’t mean that when he said “man made horrors beyond comprehension”
Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency “executives.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall
Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.
Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).
Dead internet? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the job hunting process?
(Github project supposedly for AI assisted mass job application, including using the AI to cater resume to job posting. God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
Absolutely. automated AI applicants getting read by automated AI parsers. It’s inanity!
One thing I hope comes out of all this nonsense is that it collapses the modern job seeing meta completely.
(I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but nonetheless)
both myself and 2 people I know were hunting last year. it’s hell (in tech, which has historically been fucking abysmal at hiring to start with). the ways this shit is going to affect other industries too…
some numbers: the one friend applied to something in the 1000 posts, the other 400-600 in the space of approx 4-5mo. both barely heard back from anyone, or if they did it was often months after. on some of mine, I got nack/followup mails approx 7-8mo after sending details. and that’s without even mentioning the utter fucking toxic dump swamp of listings…. holy shit what a mess
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the “created” notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
Oh it was for the KPIs? All is forgiven then. /s
right? if only you knew it was for Sacred Advertising Revenue and Good Statistics, you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself so in public! alas, the dangers of the modern internet
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”
Gonna change my name to Goldman Sachs and style myself as my own founder.
he’s a self-made man, apparently
Vivek “I gave birth to myself” Ramaswamy
Your family wants to see you post on threads bullshit is laughable
Your family wants to see you
Doubt
