Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)
And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.
Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.
it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with
It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined
Oof.
Noted for the amusing headline: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6
Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Do note that it appears to be an advert for ai peer review detection services, but I was still tickled by the whole “why are there leopards at our face-eating conference” surprise being expressed.
Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.
Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.
Whats your P(Yakub)
Hanson into conspiracies, Goertzel into parapsychology, going well on the rational/transhuman side.
Tomorrow Grimes will DJ a livestream of immortality influencer Bryan Johnson tripping on shrooms to determine its effect on longevity. Mr. Beast and the CEO of Salesforce will be there too.
Now, folks out there are calling this a Biblically accurate blunt rotation, but to be fair, it’s missing Aella.
I was tempted to gawk but then I realised… the guy’s just going to see some shapes in the light and it’s going to be boring as shit
(not in any way meaning to stan the weirdo) at that dosage it might be more than that, but also it’s ??? to me to consider taking that much while also being exposed to a bunch of people like that around me
and that it’s even the dosage it is feels like it tells you a hell of a lot about the extent of his baseline intake too
these creeps are doing a better job at antidrug messaging than any propaganda I ever saw
I dont know much about dosage numbers etc, care to mention a bit more how much is normal and how much he is off the baseline?
(I just recall some old friends who once tried shrooms and didnt seem to notice much so they went to a disco and for one of them it hit at the middle of the dancefloor so he stood there like a statue (the guy was also tall and a metalhead, so quite a sight). And before it became illegal (some tourist got himself killed by using shrooms and drinking and they blamed the shrooms) to give others spores or something I managed to get some from someone as a promo/anarchist thing. Never did anything with them).
(Fine if you dont want to, or if talking about it exposes you/others to risk etc, dont. Just curious).
Someone needs to offer Erin Patterson a Suicide Squad deal
Found a fitting lament for our current era:
alt text: “Kinda hate that we live in a world where any new F/OSS tool or operating system that gets buzz needs to be vetted for Nazi entanglements.”
Nazi entanglements
That’s why none of the quantum computers work
I heard the same complaint from leftist metal fans.
See also goth/industrial music. The latter also has (like metal) a bit of a sexism issue.
Out of all the documentation pages written by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), I think this just might be the shortest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models
and it made it to being an actual content guideline, not just an essay!
Oh wow, that’s gloriously terse. I agree that it might be the shortest. For comparison, here are three other policies whose pages are much longer and whose message also boils down to “don’t do that”: don’t post copypasta, don’t start hoaxes, don’t start any horseshit either.
Dont start hoaxes
As a confession, I did that once, made up a fictional thing. The page lived for quite a long time. Untill somebody outside of my circle saw the orphaned page and promptly (and rightfully) deleted it. Was 20 years ago or so however.
It was so orphaned it didnt even get indexed by search engines.
Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
“Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker”
Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends
(His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)
Years ago, I said, “I’ve never finished a Stephenson novel.” Someone replied, “Neither has he.”
oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time
We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.
Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.
Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave
Best part is the footnote:
About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.
Stephenson knows how computers work.
@dgerard he does, looks like
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Sub-hypothesis 1B: the AI was fed the whole book but the input was truncated because whatever toolchain they used wasn’t made to handle 160k words at a time.
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 please do not insult the noble machine consciousnesses thus. It was probably written by a venture capitalist.
Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.
“Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”
Andreessen Horowitz? More like, And here’s some horse shit
@swlabr yup
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 real missed opportunity to end that post mid-sentence
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 The only thing that could have made that article better is if he’d literally ended it mid-sentence.
Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.
…sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.
…no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth
but he never helps huck finn out financially?
pretty shit story, mark
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)
It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?
truly massive
fuzzy logic says this thing has mass most of the time, ish
english is a fuck
What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?
“Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.
The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”
Found a primo sneer aimed at a slop supporter’s unofficial manifesto today:
https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/you-probably-shouldnt-block-ai-bots-from-your-website/
(Don’t mind the title, its ironic)
The fucking bubble is bursting.
Doubt it, like cryptocurrencies, it will be kept on life support a lot longer and even more and more parts of the economy will be sacrificed to it.
Not that I disagree with the rest of the article btw. Im just annoyed at people claiming the bubble is bursting every time nvidia has 5% stock price reduction that is back to 0 the day after. So im lashing out due to that.
transcript
Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.
A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.
Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sex workers he could hire who could help him with that.
E: forgot to mention, a sex worker even confirmed this is a kink.
I don’t think sex workers should be tasked with society offloading glinner
glinner should fucking suck less
Certainly. Some might want to take his service however, not going to speak for them. But doubt he would be a good client, nor that he would pass the vibe check for any who didn’t already knew who he was. So not sure if he is even able (also doubt he is mentally able as he sees women too much as objects to he saved/protected vs actual people).
But yes sorry if that came off as offloading societies problems on sex workers.
oh no
He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.
coming soon to whatever remains of CBS with an introductory 1 hour lecture by Bari Weiss
most well adjusted terf
The CIA wouldn’t be able to torture this kinda shit out of me. Jesus, Linehan.
What the fuck
TIL I take the same medicine as Glinner
Just wanted to say that I’m thankful for all yall.
A week-ish ago I said that Mike Masnick is twice as annoying about AI as Dare Obasanjo.
Yeah Dare has been plausible deniable all in on AI for a while now.
There’s base-level sneer as this is posted on LW, but I found this comparison of LLM in call centers to cheap human labor for the same interesting:
So I’m not double checking their work because that’s more of a time and energy investment than I’m prepared for here. I also do not have the perspective of someone who has actually had to make the relevant top-level decisions. But caveats aside I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here:
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It’s actually heartening to see that even the LW comments open by bringing up how optimistic this analysis is about the capabilities of LLM-based systems. “Our chatbot fucked up” has some significant fiscal downsides that need to be accounted for.
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The initial comparison of direct API costs is interesting because the work of setting up and running this hypothetical replacement system is not trivial and cannot reasonably be outsourced to whoever has the lowest cost of labor due. I would assume that the additional requirements of setting up and running your own foundation model similarly eats through most of the benefits of vertical integration, even before we get into how radically (and therefore disastrously) that would expand the capabilities of most companies. Most organizations that aren’t already tech companies couldn’t do it, and those that could will likely not see the advertised returns.
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I’m not sure how much of the AI bubble we’re in is driven even by an expectation of actual financial returns at this point. To what extent are we looking at an investor and managerial class that is excited to put “AI” somewhere on their reports because that’s the current Cutting Edge of Disruptive Digital Transformation into New Paradigms of Technology and Innovation and whatever else all these business idiots think they’re supposed to do all day.
I’m actually going to ignore the question of what happens to the displaced workers here because the idea that this job is something that earns a decent living wage is still just as dead if it’s replaced by AI or outsourced to whoever has the fewest worker protections. That said, I will pour one out for my frontline IT comrades in South Africa and beyond. Whenever this question is asked the answer is bad for us.
I’ve worked in an adjacent field (workforce planning) and I deliver B2B software support for a living, so I too have Thoughts.
At least here in Schwedenland, contact centers have been filed down by relentless cost and tech pressure to be about as automated as can be. You have websites with FAQs, simple chatbots that basically repeat the FAQ for those for whom reading more than a sentence of text is too hard, phone trees to gatekeep you from the Inner Sanctum, etc. etc. The end result is that the actual people taking the calls are gonna be the ones who can make human decisions - troubleshoot a complex issue, handle insurance claims, upsell your mortgage.
Trying to att LLM voice tech to that is just going to add another filter between the customer and the center, with the additional reputational risk of the robot fucking up and losing the customer.
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Crosslinking SRD: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1p88k7d/guys_were_gonna_be_okay_maybe_not_today_maybe_not/
Observing AI psychosis from a distance is so fascinating. “Valentine just got nerfed for me.” What???
people out there signing off shit like that with their online presence that wouldn’t be waterboarded out of anyone 15 years ago
The rise of social media has made people disturbingly willing to give out extremely personal info/secrets. Jesus.
Tołalbottl
There’s a PubPeer thread.
idk what i have expected
I’m “LIne storee” babyee.
kinda impressive that “Factor Fexcectorn” shows up twice, imagine how many credits were offered on the pyre of context management
Factor Fexcectorn sounds like a Roman centurion who tried to improve the army’s logistics by hitching multiple wagons together in sequence.
I was thinking Factor Fexcectorn was the name of a furry OC, with an extensive backstory and a surprising amount of commissioned art. Fits in a fantasy or sci fi setting or both. Oh god am I writing an OC
Oh god am I writing an OC
the ao3 submission form calls you forth
The Fexcectorns are a storied family of fox-unicorn hybrids NO STOP GET OUT OF MY HEAD
also what in the cursed fuck is going on with the glyphs over the “meter” bars
The article’s abstract made me die a hundred times
hey siri can you write me a nothing paper that combines two popular topics that are easy to bullshit about
“K9: scom”, just need to figure out what scom is.
But my favorite part is in the upper left, the brain that just says “Autism” and “Autism” around it.
these are autism particles
Wow. Quantum nature of autism confirmed. And people say the slop machines can’t do science…
… Autons?
Automs
for years the human experience has vastly exceeded the codifications of mere simplistic scientist narrative, and it has long been known that the standard model was all wrong. in this essay I will
Good day to remember the rat dck pck.
And this is not the first time Scientific Reports has been sneered.
This artifact can bring bio med people on-side like nothing else.
I’m the left leg clipping through the table. Also, i like how x axis on lower left chart is out of order
just found out about the incredibly dystopian US prison “ADX”
Inside the federal supermax tucked away in Colorado’s high desert, prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day locked alone inside concrete cells that are smaller than a standard parking space. The prison, formally called United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility but better known as ADX, has earned the nickname “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” because of its harsh conditions.
Contact with others is extremely limited; programming, such as anger management or religious services, is broadcast over televisions in the cells, while psychological evaluations happen through the steel doors. Belongings are also strictly limited and prisoners aren’t allowed to hang photographs or drawings on their walls. Exercise time out the cell happens alone inside large cages called “dog runs”, where prisoners can only walk a few paces each direction. Prisoners are given virtual reality goggles to simulate the outdoors or community. A former warden once called ADX a “clean version of hell,” and said that living there was “far much worse than death.” Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are both incarcerated at ADX.
