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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    7·
    2 小时前

    the talking point about disparaging terms for AI users by choice “I came up with a racist-sounding term for AI users, so if you say ‘clanker’ you must be a racist” is so fucking stupid it’s gotta be some sort of op

    (esp when the made-up racist-sounding term turns out to have originated with Warren fucking Ellis)

    i am extremely disappointed that awful systems users have fallen for it for a moment

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    5·
    4 小时前

    The billionaires’ dreams of defeating death with technology have been “realised” by Marvel, which is planning an AI-Poweredtm hologram of him at L.A. Comic Con.

    To the shock of nobody, this act of exploitation through digital necromancy is being met with unfiltered disgust.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      5 小时前

      Check the guys profile. He took some random remark from Gwern indicating what looks to me like human interest, as some sort of commandment.

      My first instinct was to dismiss him as an oddball—until a friend told me I was dealing with a legend of rationality. I have to admit: I nearly shit myself. His comment got more likes than the post I’d spent years working on.

      Someone with, what, a 152 IQ wanted my accounts of surviving bureaucratic military hell? And I’m the same guy who applies scientific rigor to Pokémon analysis

      (The text is bolded etc in various places which I didn’t reproduce)

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      11 小时前

      So this looks and sounds 100% AI generated, but

      Possible performance idea: A “kata of doubt,” mixing martial arts stances with expressions of deep confusion.

      might be the first time AI slop made me laugh (not out loud, but still)

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        17 小时前

        All is forgiven. Hot Ones is an internet interview show. Its core premise is that the host and interviewee conduct their interview while eating increasingly spicier chicken wings. As with any interview platform, it’s a common stop for public figures to hit up, especially on PR tours.

        The show has a reputation for researching its guests well and asking insightful/deep questions. There’s also an element to it where, for some guests, as they experience spicier wings, they are unable to keep up whatever facade or persona they usually keep up in interviews.

        I wasn’t making any profound commentary; I want to see Yud in pain while trying to explain alignment.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        17 小时前

        YouTube interview show where the interviewee is fed hot-sauce coated chicken wings of escalating spiciness

        As an aside, my personal tolerance is such that if I ever go on there, I’m going to end up bankrupting the fuckers

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      24 小时前

      Wonder if, esp considering the DHH situations this is sort of a nazi bar style takeover. Where the people who don’t want to make a fuss let in the nice but iffy people who then go mask off, and let the rest in. (The thing the far right accused the left of doing, in a bit of projections). But I know nothing about the politics of anybody involved, could also just be a regular hostile takeover.

      (Doesn’t feel like one just looking at the rubycentral bsky account for a second though. They do have an amazing spin on it. It was to protect against supply chain attacks (also a link to an email article of them, which just feels weird)).

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        22 小时前

        ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time

        I haven’t been active in/near the ruby space for a number of years now so I can’t speak to the modern details well at all, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to learn that the various branches of it haven’t really learned how to deal. I will say that I have seen some improvement over that period, but… yeah

        • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          13 小时前

          ruby’s had this problem for ~2 decades now. like, the “rockstar dev” archetype literally became big directly because of ruby’s popularity and perception at the time

          I had to look it up, the ~Rails Conf~ Golden Gate Ruby Conf code like a porn star thing was 2009, I didn’t hallucinate it. DHH has deleted those tweets.

          I feel old now.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          19 小时前

          Another sneer on the subject: https://bsky.app/profile/tef.bsky.social/post/3lz7fdou4uk2y

          "In case you’re not sure who dhh is, he’s a danish counterstrike player and race car owner who writes essays like “i am smarter than you” and “foreigners bad”

          rich enough not to worry about consequences but at the very same time, still desperate for status, a man two friends short of a podcast"

          Followup by somebody else:

          “I posted here about him driving at Le Mans in 2024, and several people told me that he’s disliked and mocked as much in the motorsport community as he is in the tech community.”

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    1 天前

    Fresh of the press, only in german unfortunately: tagesschau

    President of bavaria (and head of the extra fashy bavarian splinter party of the christian conservatives) wants to cut 10.000 public service jobs using AI.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    1 天前

    Doing my screaming into the void offtopic thing, but the Dutch parliament, consisting of the the liberal VVD all the far right (PVV, FVP, JA21) and half the extreme christian (but not far) right (SGP the reformed/protestants (*)) , and the conspiratorial partially far right farmers party (BBB) accepted a motion (also important to note that these are not that meaningful, nothing has changed legally) by the far right to declare antifa a terrorist organization.

    Congrats to everybody here now being terrorists in the eyes of the Dutch gov. Ah the joys of living in an American colony.

    *: Even less relevant to this sub, but perhaps interesting, did you know we have a so called bible belt in the Netherlands? See this wiki page and look at the voting results graph. (while there is no direct graph our second very christian party (The CU who often also votes with them (but didn’t this time because they are not that extreme) also generally gets their votes from this area. What makes this downright weird is that these voters are basically from our rural areas, but on the line that historically splits between protestantism and catholicism. But all these votes are more from the protestant side. Some sociologists prob could/can have written some interesting papers on that. So it can’t just be explained by pillarisation. Hope you enjoyed my random scream into the void which I tried to make somewhat interesting by talking about parts of our weird political situation.

    (Bonus detail, the prot/cath split line is also the line of 'do they celebrate carnival really enthusiastically or not, for which the rule is, if you want a real party go to Maastricht (sorry link in Dutch), as it combines several styles of carnaval with its own thing (there are also some small dressup particularities, but as I don’t know them specifically. Great fun if it is your thing (or so I have been told)). Anyway the further south the better (we have different names for the carnaval styles even, ‘Bourgondisch carnaval’ vs ‘Rijnlands carnaval’ for example))

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      1 天前

      That reminds me I still need to wipe my reddit an twitter archives. Wonder if wiping it all in one go would cause more trouble for them, or if deleting it slowly (or overwriting with random words in the case of reddit) causes more changes in the datasets and messes with them more like that.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        22 小时前

        from when I last looked into this: twitter 100% has[0] (unstated) web API ratelimits for various subservices[1], but getting direct API creds became a “give us your actual phone number” thing even before felon took it over…

        so I just decided to tombstone my account by making it private, updating bio, and never logging in again

        not willing to give them what they want for API access. might at some point go write some web automation to recurringly click a delete button? idunno

        [0] - …well, 4 years ago, “had”. probably maybe still does, on whatever parts of the haproxy or whatever config didn’t get absolutely fucking destroyed in felon’s mania to rebrand it to “x” overnight (a process which failed hilariously badly for weeks and I still think fondly of to laugh at)

        [1] - when going through the “your interests” list (hidden deep in settings), if you unticked too many boxes too quickly you’d hit a webserver-enforced ratelimit on request limits and then half the webapp would get a bit fucky for an hour. ratelimit was something like 30/min with a 1/m type token-bucket refresh. quite the shitshow

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          22 小时前

          Yeah, I figured I would need some web automation script for that, I have looked into them in the past, but never gotten far with it before something else was more important. Still silly that is needed and will hit the servers harder than an API would. Just strange priorities.

          When I looked at ‘your interests’ in the past it was so incredibly wrong I resisted the urge to update it because I though ‘sure if that is what you think is important to me fine’. Gotta make sure the basilisk can’t simulate you ;).

          Ratelimits would be the big worry, heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand. And the whole like system is broken anyway. If you remove enough of them by hand you get in the situation where tweets show in your list but they do not look like they were liked by that account. (I always had the suspicion the whole likes system, which people got mad over a lot is badly implemented anyway, and that explains the weirdness people saw, a thing this story seems to confirm).

          I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that. (Not sure I can even find the list anymore anyway or at least a complete list, mine always stopped after 100 accounts or so, while I block a few more than that).

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            21 小时前

            heard people reached those by just deleting tweets by hand.

            yeah, the various backend interactions tied to web controls are extremely low-count limited

            you could probably do it by smacking together a userscript (or whatever the fuck is the these-days version of greasemonkey/tampermonkey/??? to use) with a moderately simple algorithm… open a window, click execute, leave it going by itself for however long it takes to get through everything. it doesn’t have to do everything in minutes

            I also heard blocklists put a high strain on the twitter so not going to look into removing that

            probably the feed compute stuff only has this computational expense incurred for any displayed feeds (pruning off calculating stuff for long-enough-inactive users is one of the cheapest easy gains in that type of content feed), so this might not matter much. don’t have enough insight into real ops there to know one way or the other tho

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      3·
      1 天前

      Nah, its completely on-topic - “bad tech hurting people” has become a major theme of our current times, a bad glucose monitor hurting diabetics is completely expected

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      8 小时前

      Slack CEO responded there that it was all a “billing mistake” and that they’ll do better in the future and people are having none of it.

      A rare orange site W, surprisingly heartwarming.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        8 小时前

        I really don’t buy the “billing mistake” line - they’ve been doing the same thing to many other community-org slacks. I’ve seen with my own eyes the mail that was sent to the ZA tech slack

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      11 小时前

      I’m a bit split on this one

      on the one hand, the post as first posted had a lot of “victimised” language (“omg slack is extorting us”) and frankly that felt like bait - esp as many, many volunteer-type orgs that have had similar slack setups have been taking a hammer for months now (as I posted before, a local ZA tech setup was one, and more recently that big k8s one too). there’s enough precedent here that expecting slack to have behaved otherwise (even “honourably”) seems to me to have been almost foolish

      on the other, slack 100% only took action once this did hit hype and enough eyeballs, and only reacted since it was an embarrassment

      but…yeah. slack hasn’t been a good option for public use for literally years now :|

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        5 小时前

        It sucks how much time in tech is spend on 'sorry this tool we recommend before suddenly is no longer free, or removed some options (either totally or into the paywall part) so now we will have to look for something else.

        Seen it happen to simple csv editors for example.

  • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 天前

    This one’s been making the rounds, so people have probably already seen it. But just in case…

    Meta did a live “demo” of their recording new AI.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    2 天前

    Recently thought about how this one xkcd has probably done more recruiting for the rat community per unit effort spent making it than that 700k word salad.

    Where are we on xkcd? I haven’t looked at it regularly for over a decade now. Nothing personally against the author or comic itself, I just completely deconverted from consuming nerd celebrity content at that point in the past.

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 天前

      maybe this just betrays that i don’t know shit about fuck, but it feels like this xkcd would make more sense if the frequentist did the experiment more than once

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 天前

      I still read xkcd regularly and think it’s pretty good. I don’t think “we” as a community need to have a particular opinion of Randall Munroe or his work but personally I think he seems alright and I enjoy the things he makes.

      Seems like a stretch to assume that comic does anything to recruit rationalists. If you’re not already in the rat pipeline it’s just a pretty good joke about probability and if you are, it’s still a better example of Bayesian reasoning than whatever the rats pretend to do.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 天前

      I follow it on RSS, it’s sometime’s funny but not required reading.

      I don’t think you can blame the comic’s author for people on HN and elsewhere passing around references to specific comics to make their points.

      As to the specific one mentioned here, I don’t remember reading it before.

      edit to add sometimes it’s obvious the entire joke is in the alt-text, like so: https://xkcd.com/3143/

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 天前

      He kind of left his prime I think, the humor becoming alternatingly a bit too esoteric or a bit too obvious, and kind of stale in general. Nothing particularly objectionable about the author comes to mind otherwise.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 天前

    Many of our favorite people abuse meth and meth adjacent sustances. In the long term, this behavior visibly degrades dental health.

    Therefore, it wont be long until we witness actual real life cases of smartmouth.