Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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. If you’re wondering why this went up late, I was doing other shit)

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      44·
      11 hours ago

      there is some reason to think this way. also keep in mind that a segment of that anti-americanism was funded by sales of iranian oil. not all of course, but houthis wouldn’t be a thing without it, or large parts of hezbollah, for example. of course what people want and how it shakes down after the bombs drop is different thing entirely, i guess we’ll see, eventually (i assume that decision to strike was already made)

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        The best thing an unpopular regime can ask for is the enemy they have been bigging up as literally The Great Satan starts dropping bombs and missiles on the populace that hates it.

        “If we bomb people and show their government can’t protect them, they will turn against the government and we will win” has been tried by the Germans on Londoners, the Allies on Germany and Japan, and the US on Serbia, and it didn’t work.

      • aninjury2all@awful.systemsEnglish
        73·
        10 hours ago

        That’s cute, how about you find me a source that isn’t a spooky blob think tank?

        Or better yet, enlist and we can rid the world of another Sam Harris fanboy

        • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
          41·
          8 hours ago

          i don’t give a shit about sam harris. if iranians were broadly fine with theocracy, there wouldn’t be 30k+ dead protesters last month, or major protests every year for a decade. like every other country on earth, you can expect that iran secularizes, except that apostasy or conversion is capital offense, or any significant dissent for that matter, so any survey unaffected by self-censorship would be hard to conduct

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            6 hours ago

            While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn’t satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn’t like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you’re going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administration has shown a less-than-comforting attitude towards civilian casualties, war crimes, and genocide.

            Let’s also not lose sight of the role that US and British intervention played in creating the circumstances for the Ayatollahs to come to power in the first place. The Shah wasn’t exactly any kinder to the Iranian people and was a foreign puppet to boot.

            Harris’s take only works if, like him, you assume that the fundamental problem with Iran is Islam, rather than actually bothering to look at the history of the country and how it became what it is today. Because in that case once you get the ayatollah out of the way and introduce the light of Science! to the people they’ll immediately become rational civil libertarians and believe exactly the same things he does. The Irreligious Right is exactly as reductive and stupid as the worst evangelicals, but can better use the language of STEM to hide it.

            • Svante@mastodon.xyz
              2·
              6 hours ago

              @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare Yes, absolutely, civilization (or whatever word you like better here) will not happen automatically or magically.

              And I’m not finding an answer: How do you /properly/ remove an oppressive theocracy, in such a way that the country has good starting conditions to prosper?

              Two things seems clear to me: the theocrats will not go by themselves, and the country will not prosper under them.

              • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
                5·
                6 hours ago

                @Ardubal @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare This hasn’t happened in Iran, but oppressive theocracies *have* decayed from inside elsewhere—notably Ireland since 1980 (the difference now is as night and day, yet there was no revolution and no shooting, and the country has prospered). Arguably Spain’s clerico-fascist system went the same way in the 1970s. And so on.

                Iran is different, though, in that it faces a violent, powerful external superpower, which indirectly props up the priesthood.

                • Svante@mastodon.xyz
                  1·
                  5 hours ago

                  @cstross @YourNetworkIsHaunted @fullsquare OK, but I don’t see the automatism in that direction either. And just letting them simmer in their own little cosmos doesn’t seem very sustainable when they organize and support e. g. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi.

                  Starting a war now is not the answer, I’m pretty sure, but the question remains.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    12 hours ago

    from Rusty https://www.todayintabs.com/p/a-i-isn-t-people

    Imagine you have two machines. One you can open up and examine all of its workings, and if you give it every picture of a cat on the whole internet, it can reliably distinguish cats from non-cats. The other is a black box and it can also reliably distinguish cats from non-cats if you give it half a dozen pictures of cats, some apple sauce, and a hug. These machines sort of do the same thing, but even without knowing how the second one works I am extremely confident in saying it doesn’t work the same way as the first one.

    • ________@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      5 hours ago

      cobol is old and scary, so a chat bot spitting out cobol that someone without grey hair cant fully comprehend is enough for them to deem it fully automated and defeat of the dinosaur. reality you are right, it wont move the needle.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    13 hours ago

    I feel like the story of Cassandra would be much more gratifying if she’d had access to powered armor.

    • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      1 day ago

      this is like the fourth time an AI agent has completely deleted something important (I remember an article about an AI deleting all of a scientists’s research) How many more times does it have to happen before people stop using AI to look after something important???

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        6 hours ago

        A computer that both does what you don’t tell it to do and doesn’t do what you tell it to do. I didn’t think we could do it but - I tell you what - it’s been done.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        16 hours ago

        Before they could ask grok how to stop a process it was already too late.

        Not that it mattered as Groks advice to become the reichschancellor actually didnt fix this problem.

      • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        19 hours ago

        You assume these people installing experimental non deterministic software on their computer would know how to purge a process (or, you know, not to hook up vibe coded slop to their inbox) but here we are. To get a director job in a big company, the main thing you need is an MBA, a willingness to do whatever the CEO asks of you and either a sociopathy or psychopathy diagnosis (sorry for the repetition, I know I already said MBA). Technical skills “nice to have”

    • JFranek@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      22 hours ago

      The article tries to fact check Asha Sharma’s (the new CEO) claim that

      fertility rates are declining, the average birthrate in the ’90s when we were growing up was, like, 3, and now it’s 2.3, and in 2050 it’s estimated to be below replacement

      Unfortunately, they forgot that other countries than the US exist and didn’t occur to them that she could be talking about global fertility rates. In which case the claim is pretty much correct.

      Embarrasing.

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        13 hours ago

        I mean, sure, but it’s still the CEO of XBOX on her second day on the job throwing her hat in the legendarily sus declining birthrates discourse in service of AI solutionism, it’s not nothing.

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Usually AI boosters are claiming that soon most humans will be economically useless, not that it would be terrible if there were fewer white people. One reason people avoid having children is that they feel economically insecure and doubt there will be respected places in society for their offspring.

      Dwarkesh Patel is the only other Indian American I have seen who is friends with our friends.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    From fellow traveler stats consultant John Mount:

    https://johnmount.github.io/mzlabs/JMWriting/WeAreCookedLLMs.html

    Somehow he manages to touch on so many different subplots, a shotgun sneer instead of snipe

    if “tech-bro” plus a LLM is a “100x engineer”, then “bro” isn’t needed for much longer as the LLM alone must be a “99x engineer.” However, I don’t think “bro plus” is often really a 100x engineer, and the LLM alone isn’t a 99x engineer. However, “bro plus” may outlast their peers who make the mistake of trying to do the actual work in place of talking LLMs up.

    The above may or may not be the case. But if it is, then it is the LLM-bros (which include non-technologists, con artists, financiers, men and women) that are destroying everything - not the LLMs.

    The problem with this iteration is the full court press of finance and technology. The major players are using financing to dump results at a price way below production costs. This isn’t charity, it is to demoralize and kill competition.

    claiming “after we take over the world we will consider adding Universal Basic Income (UBI)”. The LLM bros already have a lot of the money, and they are not even rehearsing diverting it into basic income now. Why does one believe they would do that when they also have all of the power?

    You don’t have to hand it to Altman, but he did fund the largest UBI experiment through Open Research with his il gotten gains. OTOH, one interpretation of that data was that UBI “decreases the labor supply” which was then used directly as an argument against it.

    Any worry about scope or power of LLMs is fed back as an alignment threat so dire that only the current LLM leaders should be allowed to continue work (inviting regulatory capture). Any claim the LLMs don’t work is fed back as “you are prompting it wrong”

    Orbital deployment makes all of radiation tolerance, connectivity, power, maintenance, and heat dissipation much harder and much more expensive. We are still at a time where putting an oven or air-frier in space is considered noteworthy (China 2025, NASA 2019 ref).

    air friers IN SPACE ha

    I am more worried about the LLM-bros and their auto-catalytic money doomsday machine than about the LLMs themselves.

    100% - ACMDM is a nice turn of phrase as well.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Looks like they’re gonna ruin BattleBots with AI somehow. Bright Data appear to be web scraping bastards as a service.

    I’ll never forgive them for what they did to the 80 lb slab of rotating steel.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        13 hours ago

        Thanks, this is a nifty read; I’m appreciating having a look into the world of the bastards who are ruining the web with residential proxy/botnet operations. I had kind of (mistakenly) assumed that the scrapers mostly relied upon IoT trash and hacked Fire sticks. We really can’t have nice things anymore, huh?

        The company is embroiled in legal action in Israel. After it filed suit against a former employee, he countersued, alleging that Luminati is widely used for click fraud. As part of the suit, it was revealed that the spyware company NSO Group was a Luminati client.

        Well that escalated quickly

        PS: i really really wish my special interests would quit touching

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    211·
    2 days ago

    Starting this Stubsack off with one programmer’s testimony on the effects of the LLM rot:

    For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

    Before LLMs, I’d encounter [software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge] a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it’s a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

    After LLMs, there’s been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can’t do any work at all. They can’t even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can’t even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

    It’s bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Jesus fucking christ I need to invent a time machine so I can go back and make my past self be an electrician instead because this. Commercial software engineering has absolutely been captured by some of the silliest people and trends out there.