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…)

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    5 hours ago

    JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don’t wanna bypass their paywall

    Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

    American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […]

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      This shit os going to drive so many amateur pedo/etc hunters (who already are not the people who are good at being normal) into absolute crazy conspiracy theory land. Esp when they cant get the fake pimps (yeah pimps really, these cops seem to be like the military dude in the intro of ideocracy) arrested or banned.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      8 hours ago

      Ok that is it, im changing my mind. All the rationalist genetics stuff is real and true as there is a fascism gene.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 hours ago

      If Palantir represents a veritable unknown for the public, so too could its UK chief, the grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of former F1 president Max Mosley.

      Ah, yes, noted grandfather and nothing else, Oswald Mosley. Definitely not the founder of British Union of Fascists, please don’t look into that. His son was in the racecar business, isn’t that lovely?

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    18 hours ago

    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.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      12 hours ago

      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.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      19 hours ago

      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.

      E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      It really sucks so much how many coders embrace it. At my work, there is the looming introduction of code LLMs very soon, and I’m anxious to learn how many of my colleagues will happily use it, and the consequences it will have for me to deal with the results (and generally, how it will make me feel to work in an environment where these tools are embraced). I was hoping that the corporate bureaucracy would be slow enough that the AI bubble collapses before it’s allowed to use the tools, but unfortunately management put a lot of pressure behind it and it all went faster than expected :(

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        17 hours ago

        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.

        • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          12 hours ago

          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.

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can’t Be Bothered

    It’s a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don’t have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

    I really didn’t think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, “an insult to life itself”.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      18 hours ago

      Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can “save us”. It’s just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children

    features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesn’t qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    2 days ago

    previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions

    Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you’re forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.

    Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.

    So they asked support.

    And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy

    One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to ‘mimic human responses’

    haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.

      Edit… looking at the orange site comments… some unironically cited Anthropic research marketing hype, which (correctly) shows “Chain-of-Thought” is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it’s Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Wtf

      E: it might have been fixed, now only if they also fixed all the other things. Erugh hate how much they are offloading the ‘is this valuable’ thing on just how mad (and who) people are getting. Such an extreme social cost (but very ‘X but on the blockchain!’ techbro style offloading of the costs unto others)

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        I hope that either way the opportunity will be taken to move this all to a safer/independent footing.