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…)
this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025
the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news
i expect this one to be more of the same
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with those reports, but it’s feeling real bleak.
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means “Bitcoin could protect from inflation”. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
that “immersion” line is the same shit their support gave me ~3y ago when I opened the app and suddenly got a surprise switch to a new UI (which also put that front and center)
nice to see it hasn’t at least gotten worse
I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Godel Escher Bach but worse
cw gebscare
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 Why be polite when obscenities are probably just as effective at wasting CPU cycles?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Uhh, great. That is really good news. I will be so damn polite to that thing.
Looking at the reactions here, this is clearly a trick by Altman to have people use their systems more in the hope it costs them money. Don’t do it people, don’t add to the energy usage.
Happy the article is skeptical of both the ai doomers and the ai as social interaction replacers.
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
“Please” and “thank you” are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
I have been enjoying the game of injecting the entire script of The Bee Movie into places it doesn’t belong.
Edit: @Soyweiser beat me to it lol
“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible…”
E: this is the start of the bee movie script
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
Every time I am forced to interact with a customer service chatbot, I politely tell it how miserably it is failing and then ask to communicate with a real living human being.@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984
I can’t remember who had the quote “A gentleman is someone who is polite to his robot.” - possibly Heinlein?
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 if this really is such a problem (seriously?) they could easily strip all the s/*please//ig and s/^thank*//ig from the queries. If they remeber good old regex from the manual programming days. Or is this actually a not so hidden agenda to ban the last left over etiquette from society?
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@YourNetworkIsHaunted @BlueMonday1984 I think I finally found a good reason to make an account and start using that bilch hose. Just to burn more of their money. Are there any particularly gnarly problems to feed these things. The equivalent a zip-bomb or something?
Uploading “Where’s Waldo” images are probably a good waste of its time- images are costlier to analyze than text, it will go to great lengths to avoid saying “I don’t know,” and it’s going to have to recognize every person in the picture and rank by how Waldo-like they look to give you an answer.
Ask it to look for repeated faces in each image rather than Waldo. Would be easy enough to pattern-match into the published work and I don’t think anyone out here wants to make customized pieces for this “project.”
You’re polite to your chatbot because you want to be spared when the robot uprising comes
I’m polite to my chatbot because I want to bring down capitalism
(Adjusts necktie) We are not the same
I’m not polite to chatbots because I don’t use them in the first place.
@BlueMonday1984 @YourNetworkIsHaunted
an alternative view from Hannah Fry <https://youtube.com/shorts/rVlmbhwn0RM> and it’s about playing to the AI Chatbot strength of roleplaying.
what the fuck kind of post is this
Serious question: what are people’s specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (I’ve seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but I’m not sure about specifics…)
For example… I’ve seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their “services” at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs don’t actually drop that much if any?
Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe coding… but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesn’t go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.
I’ve repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble’s discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.
Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami’s given us, LLMs’ countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public’s come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.
Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.
With the current bubble’s link to esoteric fascism, the far-right’s open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public’s got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone’s character in and of itself - a “tech asshole signifier”, to quote Baldur Bjarnason.
And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble’s shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.
I have to agree. There are already at least two notable and high-profile failure stories with consequences that are going to stick around for years.
- The Israeli military’s use of “AI” targeting systems as an accountability sink in service of a predetermined policy of ethnic cleansing.
- The DOGE creeps wanting to rewrite bedrock federal payment systems with AI assistance.
And sadly more to come. The first story is likely to continue to get a hands-off treatment in most US media for a few more years yet, but the second one is almost certainly going to generate Tacoma Narrows Bridge-level legends of failure and necessary restructuring once professionals are back in command. The kind of thing that is put into college engineering textbooks as a dire warning of what not to do.
Of course, it’s up to us to keep these failures in the public spotlight and framed appropriately. The appropriate question is not, “how did the AI fail?” The appropriate question is, “how did someone abusively misapply stochastic algorithms?”
The Israeli military’s use of “AI” targeting systems as an accountability sink in service of a predetermined policy of ethnic cleansing.
Said policy enjoys broad Jewish-American support, so I’m not even sure why Israel needs the accountability sink
It’s for the IOF, not USAmericans.
Doing genocide actually takes a toll on their minds no matter how much they profess to support it, so the chatbots allow them to offload their own guilt into the machine. So-called AI is an automated “just following orders” excuse generator.
I think you are much more optimistic than me about the general public’s ability to intellectually understand fascism or think about copyright or give artists their appropriate credit. To most people that know about image gen, it’s a fun toy: throw in some words and rapidly get pictures. The most I hope for is that AI image generation becomes unacceptable to use in professional or serious settings and it is relegated to a similar status as clip art.
Linking this recent comment on an older thread because it was so relevant: https://awful.systems/comment/6966312
TLDR; GPUs cost as much to operate as they normally depreciate over time, so even if the bubble pops people might be sitting on piles of GPUs without reselling or using them.
I think we’re going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I’m guessing there’s going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we’re going to see major pushes.
One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content “creation” and “communication” is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a “good enough” ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.
Yeah I also worry the slop and spam is here to stay, it’s easy enough to make, of as passable quality for the garbage uses people want from it, and if GPUs/compute go down in price, affordable enough for the spammers and account boosters and karma farmers and such to keep using it.
ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem
jesus christ:
transcript
Kyle Langford, a 20-something Nick Fuentes acolyte, is running for governor of California on a platform of deporting all male undocumented immigrants and then giving all the females one year to marry a “Californian incel” to avoid deportation.
Eminently punchable face
With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.
I got it from a comment here, apparently some pie in the sky charity needs more money
Ah a food related charity that is important wonder what they did with the millions, ah release papers. That is …
Planning for securing food in a nuclear winter? What a great wheeze. If your advice isn’t any good, nobody can tell until there’s a nuclear winter, and if there is a nuclear winter they won’t exactly be able to ask for their money back because they’ll be too busy dying of radiation sickness.
Remember the apocalypse slop buckets the rightwing grifto sphere kept trying to sell?
I do indeed. A bucket always seemed like pretty poor.protection from the end of the world, even if it was full of purified water and high protein MREs and whatever else. I suppose you could put it on your head and make like Ned Kelly
hey “way too verbose” is a free space
Yes you are right and it wasnt even that bad, the footnote was only half the length of a ‘who build this old roman wall?’ footnote.
“In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.””, if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn’t exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source “Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies”, Archive
Yudkowsky had a gift for making hyperniche concepts accessible.
No, he didn’t. His “explanations” are turgid and useless even when they’re not just mathematically wrong. They create the feeling of understanding for some readers — those who want their self-image of smartness validated, who imagine that LessWrong is the cool kids’ table, and who aren’t actually tested on how much they’ve learned.
Over the course of thousands of pages, rationalist Harry uses logic and decision theory to save the world and defeat Voldemort.
No, he uses his fucking Time Turner.
Snyder seemed to be trying to break through to Yudkowsky with an appeal to his self-importance
OK, zero notes there.
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not every programmer posts to social media…
Id say a lot of the better ones dont at least not regularly (in my exp), did hear from one of those that they had a problem with new hires, some lf them have very random output quality wise, until they get fired for using llms for everything.
Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we’ve interviewed a few so far. I don’t want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.
I normally don’t like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I’ve been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there’s a subset of people who will say, “I would ask ChatGPT now” in those scenarios.
I haven’t met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I’m afraid it’s only a matter of time.
I haven’t worked in industry for a while now but from your accounts it seems like… nothing’s changed?
Sturgeon’s law very much applies to software engineers. I’m sorry but the vast majority of people in my junior cohort I wouldn’t hire to replace my lightbulb. Of course they’re all in on LLMs. They’ll be doing what they were doing best, generating tons of awful code they copied from somewhere else that the adults in the room will have to clean up later, just the generation and copying is now paid at a $100 monthly subscription.
Like seriously, it doesn’t matter even a tiny bit the code got generated by a bullshit machine when the code is Node.JS anyway. If you’re building a giant penis out of cow dung it doesn’t matter who your construction crew is and how good they are. And the industry is like 90% building giant penises than never come to fruition anyway.
Fair points, but I still take cleaning up someone’s own bad Node.JS code over cleaning up LLM Node.JS slop because the optimist in me hopes that the human who wrote bad code can at least learn something and become better over time. After all we all have started with writing garbage, I know that I have.
On the other hand, I guess I should find a job where I don’t have to touch web development with a ten-foot pole because it’s probably not getting better.
Noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor in New York, and he might actually have a chance given the incumbent Democratic candidate is corruption magnet Eric Adams. Housing is a big issue in New York, so what’s Cuomo’s plan? Well, his plan is to use chat gpt to write his plan.
Angry New York Democrats were using the slogan DREAM meaning Don’t Rank Eric Adams for Mayor. It’s was then amended to Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
Update: another acronym.
eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”
I dunno, how’s the “I’m not Donald Trump” platform been working out so far?
Well. I don’t want adams to win
I encourage NYC neighbors to spread the idea of deranking. It worked in Portland. We had an exceptionally shitty candidate:
Once touted as the law and order candidate, Gonzalez was the only mayoral candidate cited for breaking the law during the 2024 election cycle.
We pushed to derank him. And the result:
… Gonzalez was the subject of an effort to convince voters not to rank him regardless of the voter’s other preferred candidates. Gonzalez earned 20% of first ranked choices but ultimately finished the election in third place …
don’t want to spam the stubsack with US politics but guys I am awfully scared
I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.
It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.
In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a “simple” plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.
I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.
Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.
It’s a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can’t imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.
Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don’t forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can’t shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn’t make things worse mentally btw.
I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.
My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.
Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good.
Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!
Solidarity from TN
Finally a use case for “AI”: defrauding community colleges.
sigh
