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.

last week’s thread

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    25·
    17 天前

    Somebody pointed out that HN’s management is partially to blame for the situation in general, on HN. Copying their comment here because it’s the sort of thing Dan might blank:

    but I don’t want to get hellbanned by dang.

    Who gives a fuck about HN. Consider the notion that dang is, in fact, partially to blame for this entire fiasco. He runs an easy-to-propagandize platform due how much control of information is exerted by upvotes/downvotes and unchecked flagging. It’s caused a very noticeable shift over the past decade among tech/SV/hacker voices – the dogmatic following of anything that Musk or Thiel shit out or say, this community laps it up without hesitation. Users on HN learn what sentiment on a given topic is rewarded and repeat it in exchange for upvotes.

    I look forward to all of it burning down so we can, collectively, learn our lessons and realize that building platforms where discourse itself is gamified (hn, twitter, facebook, and reddit) is exactly what led us down this path today.

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    25·
    14 天前

    I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it’s “normal overwrought” or “LLM bullshit.” You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don’t say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like “as a language model”).

    No one describes their algorithm as “efficiently doing [intermediate step]” unless you’re describing it to a general, non-technical audience — what a coincidence — and yet it keeps appearing in my students’ writing. It’s exhausting.

    Edit: I really can’t overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

    my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

    which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get1

    In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

    and I’m fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

    1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven’t determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it’s only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      14 天前

      My sympathies.

      Read somewhere that the practice of defending one’s thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.

      I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”. My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn’t get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        14 天前

        I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because “that is what humans do”.

        But we know the tech behind these models right? They dont change their weights when they produce output right? You could have a discussion if updating the values is learning, but it doesnt even do that right? (Feeding the questions back into the dataset used to train them is a different mechanic)

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          14 天前

          That’s true, and that’s one way to approach the topic.

          I generally focus on humans being more complex than the caricature we need to be reduced to in order for the argument to appear plausible. Having some humanities training comes in handy because the prompt fans very rarely do.

  • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
    24·
    16 天前

    OAI announced their shiny new toy: DeepResearch (still waiting on DeeperSeek). A bot built off O3 which can crawl the web and synthesize information into expert level reports!

    Noam is coming after you @dgerard, but don’t worry he thinks it’s fine. I’m sure his new bot is a reliable replacement for a decentralized repository of all human knowledge freely accessible to all. I’m sure this new system doesn’t fail in any embarrassing wa-

    After posting multiple examples of the model failing to understand which player is on which team (if only this information was on some sort of Internet Encyclopedia, alas), Professional AI bully Colin continues: “I assume that in order to cure all disease, it will be necessary to discover and keep track of previously unknown facts about the world. The discovery of these facts might be a little bit analogous to NBA players getting traded from team to team, or aging into new roles. OpenAI’s “Deep Research” agent thinks that Harrison Barnes (who is no longer on the Sacramento Kings) is the Kings’ best choice to guard LeBron James because he guarded LeBron in the finals ten years ago. It’s not well-equipped to reason about a changing world… But if it can’t even deal with these super well-behaved easy facts when they change over time, you want me to believe that it can keep track of the state of the system of facts which makes up our collective knowledge about how to cure all diseases?”

    xcancel link if anyone wants to see some more glorious failure cases:

    https://xcancel.com/colin_fraser/status/1886506507157585978#m

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      19·
      15 天前

      “Aligning people is hard too” a thing that only a literal sociopath would think and only a special kind of sociopath would utter publicly

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      18·
      15 天前

      it’s amazing how intensely these assholes want to end Wikipedia and pollute all other community information sources beyond repair. it feels like it’s all part of the same strategy:

      • without consent, scrape all the information from an online source as destructively as you can
      • if possible, render that source useless by polluting it with LLM crap
      • otherwise, shut it down through political means
      • now that you’ve pulled the ladder up behind you, replace that information source with your garbage LLM and start rentseeking harder than Netflix
  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    23·
    16 天前

    in which karpathy goes “eh, fuckit”:

    a tweet by andrej karpathy, text below

    karpathy tweet text

    There’s a new kind of coding I call “vibe coding”, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It’s possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I’d have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can’t fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It’s not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I’m building a project or webapp, but it’s not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

    skipping past the implicit assumption of “well, just have a bunch of money to be able to keep throwing the autoplag at the wall until something sticks”, the admissions of not giving a single fuck about anything, and the straight and plain “well, it often just doesn’t work like we keep promising it does”, imagine being this fucking incurious and void of joy

    I’m left wondering if this bastard is running through the stages of grief (at being thrown out), because this sure as fuck reads like despair to me

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      21·
      16 天前

      This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      16 天前

      So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now “not too bad for throwaway weekend projects”. Wow, great. Let’s fire all the programmers already!

      Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.

      And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once… in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        16 天前

        So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it’s now

        on the level of a ‘build your own website’ site. They are the wysiwyg users now.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        9·
        15 天前

        that’d be easily terawatt-hours i think. just musk’s server farm’s generators are 100MW, and draw who knows how much from grid, and if it runs for a year and two months at that power that’s 1TWh. and there’s google, ms, amazon, whatever chinese are cooking,

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      15 天前

      I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it

      this is so much slower (in both keystrokes and raw time, not to mention needing to re-prompt) and much more expensive than just going into the fucking CSS and pressing the 3 buttons needed to change the padding for that selector, and the only reason why this would ever be hard is because they’re knee deep in LLM generated slop and they can’t find fucking anything in there. what a fucking infuriating way to interact with a machine.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        15 天前

        come on don’t you like waiting 1s+ for every single action you ever want to take? it’s the hot new thing

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          15 天前

          React has entered the chat (don’t try talking to it yet though, it has to “asynchronously” load every individual UI element in the jankiest way possible)

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    22·
    13 天前

    Slate says: “For the Love of God, Stop Profiling This Couple!”

    The Collinses are ineffective, abusive industry plants from Peter Thiel’s extended circle. They know they’re entirely media creations. They play off that fact to ensure that journalists never follow up on how many initiatives they’ve started and abandoned, neglect to interrogate their contradictory stances on issues like abortion and “race science,” and even seem to accept that they’re openly being taken for a ride by these dorks. Yet in spite of it all, no one listens to their podcast, they don’t really have much of a following, and their specific appeal is concentrated to a few far-right circuits.

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      11 天前

      In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

      How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        10 天前

        He’s obviously lying to try to pretend he’s some media mastermind rather than a cult member/cult leader.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      13 天前

      Dear acausal robot God, that was cathartic. Refreshing to see a mainstream journalist see through techbro weirdo uwu smol bean antics for what they are, especially after so many credulous puff pieces.

      This includes the Guardian (twice), the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Dallas Magazine, among many, many others. My industry peers very clearly want me to know about these people—a lot about them!

      I knew that a couple of outlets had done profiles of them lately, but I didn’t realize they were attention whoring this hard. Maybe their thing isn’t a breeding kink after all, but exhibitionism.

      I also didn’t know about the child abuse, though I could have seen it coming without subjecting myself to two Grauniad bits on these fuckers1.

      And then there’s the slap. The most notable aspect of the Guardian’s May 2024 profile—which, again, profiled them twice in the same year—was a moment when Malcolm slaps his son in the face, in public, after the then-2-year-old accidentally bumped into a table, leaving the boy “whimpering.” To her credit, reporter Jenny Kleeman didn’t let this go, forcing the couple to defend this punishment.

      1: Don’t even know if “fucker” is appropriate here given these bougie failchildren are apparently opting for IVF for the actual baby making part.

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        12 天前

        I think the first Guardian article had some value, just because the reporter hung around the Collinses long enough that they indicted themselves through their own actions and words. Whether that outweighs giving two eugenicists a platform to tell people about their beliefs is difficult to judge.

        Iirc, whatshisface defended himself by claiming that black parents were more likely to hit their kids, therefore it was racist to criticise him for doing so

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        16·
        13 天前

        Fun fact, I looked at that article. And my monitor exploded. No joke. I was in sudden darkness, and the mains were turned off. Pc survived thankfully, and I have a secondary monitor but lol wtf. (I need to go to bed).

    • BasiqueEvangelist@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      12 天前

      i still can’t get over how they look
      like why the fuck would you wear glasses like those
      was there even a point in time where this was fashionable

      • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        12 天前

        West Coast of USA, late 2000s to early 2010s, yes, the thick squared dark eyeglass frames were popular. Every time I see photos of these folks, I’m reminded of a couple people I know IRL as well as folks I know professionally who still prefer the thicker frames. Personally, I’ve always needed a very heavy prescription, and so I’ve always looked for the thinnest frames, but it really was a trend a decade ago.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    17 天前

    Kelsey Piper continues to bluecheck:

    Scott Alexander was accused of being secretly a right-wing racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled, and I think a bunch of his followers believed it, and now they’re shocked and hurt that he’s actually the sincere center left guy he said he was the whole time.

    (Via.)

    (For convenience: The leaked e-mails in which he admits to being secretly racist and hiding it to avoid getting cancelled. And his endorsement of super-racist Richard Lynn from last month.)

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      16 天前

      really enjoying (?) the implication that anything less than extreme genocidal resentment is considered left of centre these days

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        15·
        16 天前

        Anybody can be left of center if the overton window shifts enough far right. He doesnt want to sterilize ALL minorities so clearly he is an ally.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      16 天前

      Also, I don’t know that people are particularly concerned about the left/right spectrum as much as the explicitly racist and tacitly authoritarian sentiments. Like, if your vision of “the left” includes Scott, AOC, and Karl Marx then you have basically defined the left/right spectrum to be meaningless.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        16 天前

        Her talk of people being “desperate” for Scoot to be racist suggests a dismally gamified view of life. I mean, he’s a racist. However I feel about that, it doesn’t change the basic fact. She’s playing for a weird gotcha of some kind that could only ever make sense if you (a) regard writing as point-scoring and also (b) accept Richard Lynn-ism as science.

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    13 天前

    I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of “well I don’t know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology” and sometimesI wish I’d collected receipts to say “I told you it’s not”.

    Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

    • Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
    • Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home’s evil cousin
    • Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

    And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      13 天前

      year of Nakamoto 17

      so what you’re saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        13 天前

        Ok, maybe cryptocurrencies made those a little bit easier than doing the same thing with MMO money or having to mail physical goods. I can even go out on a limb and credit the blockchain itself for them, even though the design kind of makes transactions inherently more traceable than some possible aleternatives do.

              • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
                10·
                13 天前

                No worries. I do agree ransomware industry might not have taken off or at least might have taken off a lot slower if the victims had to make a gold mule video game character or mail cash or precious metals through seedy relay addresses to pay the ransom. So I’ll habe to credit cryptocurrency, if not necessarily blockchain per se, for that dubious achievement.

                • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
                  8·
                  13 天前

                  Yeah good point on the blockchain tech split vs actual cryptocurrencies. Esp considering the stories some of the exchanges basically did away with the blockchain for internal trades.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      26·
      17 天前

      “Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot” is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      11 天前

      A long time ago when the whole “should we cctv everything” idea was new and controversial I recall an interview or something with a london police chief, at the time the most cctved city. He admitted that cctv didnt help them stop crime or catch more criminals. He still wanted more cctv though. I think about that every now and then when there is another ‘our surveillance tech actually does not work but we want more of it’ story

  • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    16 天前

    The blue check reaction to the totally cracked treasury zoomers showcases a complete rejection of the importance of domain knowledge. It’s 10x software engineer syndrome metastasized.

    They’re saying that the ice cream hair kid - who has never worked on a real world system because he’s STILL IN COLLEGE - is going to do us proud because he translated a greek scroll in high school? Good for him, but so what? Ben Carson split babies in half like Solomon and he’s still a moron.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      16 天前

      I wonder if one of the reasons they’re so young is that’s the age you’d have to be to not realize in how much legal trouble they might be putting themselves in. (Bar an eventual pardon from Trump.)

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        15 天前

        Also the age where you are easily impressed by a supposed genius, actual billionaire, ‘meme lord’ who sort of speaks your language (but due to your age you have not noticed only in the most shallow way), who showers you with attention. While also filled with the righteous fury of wanting to act on your ideology.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      16 天前

      Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

      (One of my pet peeves in software is bad documentation (always fun when the comments and the documentation contradict, and after an hour of digging through the email archives you discover both are wrong, and nobody every cared to update either, as the email was enough), but lol if that is what saves the US gov (and look at how bad it has gotten, I’m rooting for the US gov now. If I ever want to be seen as worthwhile I will try to hire Musk to get mad at me, it worked for Zuck (a little bit))).

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        16 天前

        Don’t worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

        Oh why would they. They will just rewrite it from scratch in a weekend, right? And reading the original code would only pollute the mind with historic knowledge, and that stands in the way of disruptive innovation.

        (btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          16 天前

          (btw I appreciate your correctly nested parentheses.)

          I once fucked those up and people got mad. (I kid, they pointed out I usually use them correctly). I mostly use parentheses to note that im going a bit offtrack, which keeps happening, it is a bad habit.

          • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            16 天前

            Myself I’ve learned to embrace the em dash—like so, with a special shoutout to John Green—and interleaving ( [ { } ] ). On mac and linux conveniently short-cutted to Option+Shift+‘-’, windows is a much less satisfying Alt+0150 without third party tools like AutoHotKey.

            • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              15 天前

              I write -- for “en dash” and --- for “em dash” and I end up looking like an asshole in emails a lot. However, they appear to work correctly here:

              en: -- en: –
              em: --- em: —

              Also, Gnome Characters can be useful, though I have been looking for a good replacement.

              • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
                6·
                15 天前

                I like to use -- in plain text too! LaTeX user high five…?

                Although I read somewhere recently that some people consider usage of em-dashes as a sign of AI-generated text. Oh well.

                • self@awful.systemsEnglish
                  9·
                  15 天前

                  this feels like a pattern too — so many naturally divergent or non-standard (from the perspective of a white American who thinks they own the English language) elements of writing are getting nonsensically trashjacketed as telltale signs that a text must be generated by an LLM. see also paully g trashjacketing “delve” for purely racist reasons and the authors of the Nix open letter having the accusation of LLM use leveled at them by people who didn’t read the letter and didn’t want anyone else to either.

                • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
                  8·
                  15 天前

                  LaTeX user high five…?

                  I need to finish crying over all my underfull hboxes, can we high-five in the evening?

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    13 天前

    There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it’s really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I’m greeted with:

    Note: I have absolutely no idea what “Fcitx” even is. Or why and how it’s launched, or whether I’m actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to “improve the experience” with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I’m just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don’t even want to know how much lifetime I’ve already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      13 天前

      Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      13 天前

      I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        13 天前

        Yep, I’m certainly not claiming that Windows is better at it these days… (Possibly unpopular opinion: Windows usability peaked with WinXP.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    11 天前

    a phrase to make your skin crawl right off:

    Lighthaven cuddle puddle

    And after that shot, a chaser:

    Is the Dark Enlightenment actually fascist? Not at all. It’s probably the least fascistic strain of political thought today, though this requires understanding what fascism really is, which the word itself now obscures. Is it racist? Perhaps. The term is so malleable that it’s hard to say with clarity.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      10 天前

      this is the least fascist strain of political thought. and everybody knows. everybody knows. sometimes, this happened twice, maybe more, I have men come up to me, big strong men with tears in their eyes, and they say, mr president, we’ve never seen a strain of thought less fascist

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      11 天前

      “is this ideological project which has directly incentivised burning books and harming atypicals the same as the fascist projects which did the same? the answer may surprise you!”

      weirdly early for the revisionist PR to start, though, they’re barely done setting shit on fire

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        10 天前

        You could question how much the current setting on fire, as in a funny way the nrx creepy nerd Vance has been sidelined by jocky Musk. (I know Thiel helped in getting employees for doge so it doesnt totally fit, but just lol at nrx being benched like this). (Yes, I’m leaning a bit on the jock/creep thing here)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      10 天前

      The dark enlightenment is not fascist nor racist is one of those things you can only say if you just started reading up on them, remember the dark enlightenment map from 2013 (on rationalwiki, on the nrx page) contains quite a few open racists/fascists, the worst of all was heartiste, who posted like he was on stormfront (but really overcompensating for being lonely). Also hbd and ethno nationalists.

      Also cery easy to go, nah it isnt fascist/racist and then not give definitions.