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.)
occurring to me for the first time that roko’s basilisk doesn’t require any of the simulated copy shit in order to big scare quotes “work.” if you think an all powerful ai within your lifetime is likely you can reduce to vanilla pascal’s wager immediately, because the AI can torture the actual real you. all that shit about digital clones and their welfare is totally pointless
Yeah. Also, I’m always confused by how the AI becomes “all powerful”… like how does that happen. I feel like there’s a few missing steps there.
nanomachines son
(no really, the sci-fi version of nanotech where nanomachines can do anything is Eliezer’s main scenario for the AGI to boostrap to Godhood. He’s been called out multiple times on why drexler’s vision for nanotech ignores physics, so he’s since updated to diamondoid bacteria (but he still thinks nanotech).)
It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless
oh but what if bro…
Ah, but that was before they were so impressed with autocomplete that they revised their estimates to five days in the future. I wonder if new recruits these days get very confused at what the point of timeless decision theory even is.
ChatGPT tells prompter that he’s brilliant for his literal “shit on a stick” business plan.
The LLM amplified sycophancy affect must be a social experiment {grossly unethical}
A dimly flickering light in the darkness: lobste.rs has added a new tag, “vibecoding”, for submissions related to use “AI” in software development. The existing tag “ai” is reserved for “real” AI research and machine learning.
From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:
We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we’re forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs… and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
- They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
- They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
- They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they’re trying to sell you.
- They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
- They contradict themselves, pretending they aren’t.
- They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don’t take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
- They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
- They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
- They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
- They’re very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
An hackernews responds to the call for “more optimistic science fiction” with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
this and the pro slavery reply might be the most overt orange site nazism I’ve seen
Astro-Modest Proposal
What a piece of shit
Interesting that “disease is hardly a problem anymore” yet homeless people are “typically held back by serious mental illness”.
“It’s better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal”. It’s not. It’s really not. The wild is nothing but fear, starvation, sickness and death.
Shout out to the guy replying with his idea of using slavery to solve homelessness and drug addiction.
The homeless people i’ve interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, […]. They don’t have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public.
My goodness, can this guy be more of a condescending asshole?
I don’t think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger.
Ok, he can 🤢
Edit: I cannot stop thinking about the ‘no rich inner world’ part, this is so stupid. So, with the number of homeless people increasing, does that mean:
- Those people never had a ‘rich inner world’ but were faking it?
- In the US your inner thoughs are attached to your job like for health insurance?
- Or the guy is confusing inner world and interior decoration?
Personally, I go with the last one.
this is completely unvarnished, OG, third reich nazism, so I’m pretty sure it’s the first, except without the faking it part: I expect his view to be that if you had examined future homeless people closely enough it always would have been possible to tell that they were doomed subhumans
Oh man I used to have all kinds of hopes and dreams before I got laid off. Now I don’t even have enough imagination to consider a world where a decline in demand for network engineers doesn’t completely determine my will or ability to live.
Also hard to show a rich inner world when you are constantly in trouble financially, possessions wise, mh and personal safety and interacting with someone who could be one of the bad people who doesnt think you are human, or somebody working in a soup kitchen for the photo op/ego boost. (This assumes his interactions go a little bit further than just saying ‘no’ to somebody asking for money).
So yeah bad to see hn is in the useless eaters stage.
as a thing both parallel and tangent to usual sneerjects, this semafor article is kinda notable
I’ll try gather previous dm sneers here later, but some things that stood out:
- the author writes about groupchats in the most goddamn abstract way possible, as though they’re immensely surprised
- the subject matter acts as hard confirmation/evidence of observed lockstep over the last few years by so many of the worst fucker around
- the author then later goes “oh yeah but no I’ve actually done this and been burned by it” so I’m just left thinking “skill issue” (and while I say that curtly, I will readily be among the first people to get extremely vocal about the ways a lot of this tech falls short in purpose sometime)
Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they’re creating. Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
Maybe It’s just CEO dick measuring, so chads Nadella and PIchai can both claim a rock hard 20-30% while virgin Zuckeberg is exposed as not even knowing how to put the condom on.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.
Of course he did.
The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
So the more permissive at compile time the language the better the AI comes out smelling? What a completely unanticipated twist of fate!
Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
I’m thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
Newsom is pitching Generative AI to make government more “efficient” : https://abc7.com/post/gavin-newsom-announces-ai-driven-efforts-help-california-reduce-traffic-jams-improve-road-safety/16279785/
Blergh. Just fucking fund public transport and don’t use AI. Easy wins on traffic and efficiency.
That’s what continually kills me about these bastards. There is so much legitimate low-hanging fruit that they don’t have the administrative capacity to follow up on even if they did have the interest and rather than actually pursue any of it they want to further cut their ability to do anything in the vain hole that throwing enough money at tech grifters will magically produce a perfect solution.
Yeah. After all, Gavin Newsom was created in a test tube to be the perfect liberal career politician. Find obvious areas of concern by co-opting leftist causes, then use that as an excuse to funnel money into corporations. This is common democrat ghoul shit.
Also, I assume it gets even worse, traffic is I think one of those hard problems, those complex coordination problems which we are not great at solving using tech, if either people are their own free agents like cars, or like cars have a mass (that is why you just can’t use tcp/ip like stuff, but trains/public transport and the global goods transportation network works a lot better apart from the last mile sort of stuff). AI is not going to be able to do shit. Hell, this is prob going to be a problem like ‘im going to make sex simple’ (See also the alt text). Just pure AI magical thinking stuff.
Also, use bicycles you cowards. Death to the cult of car.
The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!
Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don’t want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
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Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.
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The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
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Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
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Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever
i don’t expect literally this but there’s some potential hidden sleaziness inside
And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the “no longer interested in Season 2” pile, but for different reasons.
The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”
So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I’m sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can’t see how it’s going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.
That and also: training and running a model still takes a ton of energy! LLMs will never be ethical.
In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.
In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA
the shunning is working guys
“Kicked out of a … group chat” is a peculiar definition of “offline consequences”.
“The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post”- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn’t get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also ‘Blutarsky’ and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
he’s a centrist econ blogger who’s been getting into light race science
yeah I tried looking up his writings on the subject but substack was down. Counted that as a win and stopped looking.
I’m a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I’m also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I’m a moderate.
And he is brave enough to say that:
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There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
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Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
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Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.
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so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
I’ve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
it’s just so fucking frustrating
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. It’s not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
after I’ve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have “chat to a buddy” as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the “buddy” is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions “MemBot - powered by AI” at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that’s a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Can’t avoid slop reading translated books, can’t learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It’s the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: that’s a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using what’s called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customer’s TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customer’s TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasn’t even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no one’s surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators they’d had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
I’ve logged a support ticket.
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don’t work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone’s done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on “correcting” my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
I just encountered a thing like this. A subject where no matter what you asked about it this one site was in the top 5 with just incomprehensible posts. Like every sentence on its own made sense, but there was nothing more than that. It read like constant promotional ‘before the actual meat of the article’ stuff but forever. Was really weird.
On the (slim) upside, it’s an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it’s more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I’ve had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium… sometimes it’s still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Less a standard piece and more “Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes” this time around
Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of “new products” that include “free user monetization.”
If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
throwback uni game!
Edit:
From the article: I apologize, this is going to be a little less reserved than usual.
