• 6 Posts
  • 147 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 29th, 2024
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
    26·
    3 days ago

    recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.

    then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.

    in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:

    While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.

    My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
    8·
    3 days ago

    before LLMs, auto-captions on Youtube used to be particularly terrible for Japanese. but thanks to the power of Gemini and very energy-intensive, biosphere-destroying giant datacenters, the captions now have become worse than ever.

    like I was watching a jidaigeki and the captions kept rephrasing stuff—in addition to the previous class of sound-based error, e.g. saying 行きます when a character is dramatically telling the other to stay alive (生きます), so it sounds like they’re fucking off and running away—which continues to happen like before, Youtube now has brand new and exciting types of error, like, bizarrely, captioning 誇り as プライド, or 冗談じゃないぞ as ゲームじゃないよ. In a jidaigeki. Presumably when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu is taking a break from playing Mario no Super Picross in his Edo-period Super Famicom

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
    14·
    20 days ago

    Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.

    After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:

    • Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
    • Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
    • We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
    • It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
    • I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
    • The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026English
    121·
    2 months ago

    Is it just me or LLM slop lately has developed this one weird quirk? I mean they always have some, right, but I don’t want to be like those people who think anyone using em-dashes or Nigerian English vocabulary must be a stochastic generator.

    Still I keep seeing this one writing quirk and it keeps nagging at me.

    I’m talking about odd use of paragraphs. Like, I’m also known to introduce a gratuitous paragraph break here and there for forced emphasis.

    But not like this. It’s like paragraphs don’t even make sense anymore.

    Couple that with the short sentences. All ending in a period. It’s annoying. It’s giving reply guy. It’s giving mansplaining.

    I guess hacky tools also mirror the hand of their creators.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
    9·
    3 months ago

    As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

    Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.

    Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026English
    7·
    3 months ago

    It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”

    Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026English
    4·
    3 months ago

    First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

    spoilers for uh the first 20 or so pages of Fairmeadow ig, click to open:
    • Who would win: 1 presumably lesbian orc, or a non-evil, not particularly terrifying cow
    • I like what the artist did with visual storytelling here: Goma confused Sanctuary with the cow because of his horns, and afterwards she still threatened Sanctuary, for the same reason she threatened the cow: she’s treating him as meat. Alas, Sanctuary utterly defeats her, in the same way that the cow did: by caring about her state and not responding to her violence at all.
    • What Sanctuary did by force-kidnessing her with the basket of squash is actually a very effective deescalation technique you can use yourself, too. It’s something salespeople do to manipulate others. Due to some quirk of human psychology, we almost reflexively feel more friendly towards someone we helped. Not someone who helps us, somebody we do a favour for. Subconscious probably goes “if I decided to do a favour for this guy he must be an ally; otherwise I wouldn’t be helping him, now would I”, which bypasses the guards of “he’s only helping me because he wants something”. Thus if you want to defuse someone’s hostility, ask them a favour—something genuinely helpful and that they are able to do, and in a way where it’s awkward for them to refuse.