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.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      29 days ago

      The GMO melons attached to that high school girl nearly took me out, but the boderline race-porn title is what killed me.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      29 days ago

      /r/AnimeCircleJerk

      Always a coin flip on if circlejerk subs are fascist or not. But this one looks pretty alright at first glance! Lots of making fun of transphobia and creepy people.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      29 days ago

      This author seems to write what is fairly typical escapism porn LNs. According to this summary the plot is about as stupid and problematic as you might expect for such a thing. If the Alya-san anime goes well this will probably get at least a manga.

      All this is just adding up to: hack author is formulaically chasing trends and trying to parlay some genAIed trash into a manga and maybe an anime.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    21·
    29 days ago

    So…a yacht named “Bayesian” just sank off the coast of Sicily. It was owned by British billionaire Mike Lynch, former CEO of Autonomy. Lynch just barely managed to stay out of trouble with US authorities over fraud charges and will likely owe HP Enterprise a hefty bag for misrepresentations before their multi-billion dollar acquisition. My heart goes out to the innocents and crew who are lost. (Edit: Lynch appears to still be missing)

    Hell of a metaphor, isn’t it?

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/aug/19/who-is-mike-lynch-tech-boss-missing-yacht-sinking-autonomy

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    29 days ago

    Trust me when I say there’s nothing worth reading in the article beyond the headline:

    He would be right if he meant in the sense that Bruce Wayne ineffectively leads a personal crusade motivated by unresolved childhood angst, and that the world would be much better off if his money was just spent on basics needs for the people and he went to therapy.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    30 days ago

    In other news, Procreate put out a damn good sneer aimed at AI art:

    Creativity is made, not generated.

    Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.

    We’re here for the humans. We’re not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.

    Unsurprisingly, they’re getting a standing ovation from artists for doing the right thing.

    • imadabouzu@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      29 days ago

      Procreate is an example of what good AI deployment looks like. They do use technology, and even machine learning, but they do it in obviously constructive scopes between where the artist’s attention is focused. And they’re committed to that because… there’s no value for them to just be a thin wrapper on an already completely commoditized technology on its way to the courtroom to be challenged by landmark rulings with no more room ceiling to grow into whooooooops.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    29 days ago

    Ran across an impressively strong sneer whilst looking through Baldur Bjarnason’s link list for the week:

    A JUST TRANSITION MEANS RESISTING A.I. (from Scottish Left Review)

    Gonna copy-paste the quote Baldur used because god damn:

    AI isn’t simply a problematic technology but an apparatus that is shaped by the injustices of our existing social relations and which, in turn, reshapes and intensifies them.

    Also got an interesting Tweet from Ed Zitron:

    This is entirely my gut instinct, but there is boiling resentment against big tech. Something is shifting, and it’s shifting violently, both in the general public and the media. Blood in the water. People are ready for a change.

    I’ve had that same gut instinct before - I’ve kinda had it since Baldur noted tech’s disconnect from the public a month ago. Feels like we’re entering an era where working in tech is treated as a red flag, a sign you’re a money-hungry asshole willing to hurt innocent people to make a quick buck.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      29 days ago

      :( I just wanted to see how many electrons I could make dance on the head of a wafer, I didn’t mean to hurt anyone :(

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        29 days ago

        The good news is that the tools created were sufficiently useful that there’s still a decent job market for tech workers (assuming we’re not focused on the griftier side), it’s just focused largely in non-tech companies.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    25 days ago

    Problematic developer with AI crush realizes she’s just dust under the wheels of progress

    https://justine.lol/history/

    You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists? It shouldn’t be the case, because no group is doing more right now to elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity. You know who the public does trust? Open source developers.

    Justine, LOL indeed.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      25 days ago

      Problematic developer with AI crush

      I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.

      Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: “Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can’t see me living with anyone else but you. Will… will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.”.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      25 days ago

      You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists?

      No, but I’d say its a good sign we’re getting close to an AI winter

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      24 days ago

      elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity

      girl my life already too complex, ain’t no one need elevation to an even higher state of complexity

      can we maybe do a lower one?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      25 days ago

      In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn’t like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.

      My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything “Justine T the open-source developer” then that association isn’t reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        26 days ago

        See, I actually don’t hate the idea of engineering and automating away parts of work. Work, almost by definition, sucks. If it didn’t suck we wouldn’t think of it as “work.”

        But the current model of AI is less trying to free humanity from work than it is freeing work from humanity. Take the important business of making the line go up away from the grubby hands of people who need things like “food” and “healthcare” as a necessary precondition for working, to say nothing of their desires for “dignity” or “respect”. Even creative and artistic work that gets underpaid in exchange for being something people can be innately passionate about can be taken away from those people and fed a diet of raw electricity and compute.

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          26 days ago

          Yea, there’s a lot of work from which it’s quite worthwhile to free humanity. It’s just that an AI company having that as its tagline and full contents of its social media bio reads with a very particular anime villain cadence. Makes me think of Seymour Guado in Final Fantasy X vowing to “free the world of its sorrow”.,

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        28 days ago

        I mean, “here’s the video you asked for” is a pretty standard setup for a Rick roll, so it’s definitely in the training data, and if it doesn’t have an actual URL to link it’s going to fill in something if it starts to spit out an affirmative response, which as we’ve seen is a really standard failure mode for these systems.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    25 days ago

    J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:

    Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      25 days ago

      lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall

      saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        25 days ago

        I mean, does she actually write books anymore? Or is she a full time TERF now? Because that’s a direct conflict between what’s in her legal best interest and in her professional best interest.

        • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          24 days ago

          Her professional interest would be to shut the fuck up and just live in her castle, forever rich beyond measure. She could never write another thing in her life and she’d never run out of money anyway.

          • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
            11·
            25 days ago

            @froztbyte @techtakes Speaking as a working writer: she’s a hobbyist writer. At this point she’s so rich she could spend £100K/week of her capital and still be a multimillionaire when she dies aged 100+. A novel typically takes a year to write and even JKR is unlikely to make significantly more than £100K from a book (unless it gets filmed). So she keeps writing for ego/self-esteem but not from necessity (to stop writing would leave a hole in her life).

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    24 days ago

    The giant bust of Elon Musk towed by a CyberTruck is real after all! https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/large-sculpture-elon-musk-towed-cybertruck-brownsville-texas-elonrwa-nft-1234715157/

    The original video I linked to looked possibly CG, because it was short and looked like the uncanny gaze of giant Elon Musk was staring directly into the camera the whole time; but turns out it is real. I’m so “happy”.

    And surprising exactly no one, it’s an advert for an NFT.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsOPMEnglish
      19·
      29 days ago

      This wasn’t the first love triangle in the Heinlein residence (they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard)

      UNSEE UNSEE

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            28 days ago

            there’s a friend of mine that’s ex-scientology. didn’t get in if their own choice, but that of family. they got out before it could really get its claws into ‘em

            but the reason I bring this up is because it’s from said friend that I learned of the fact that we have a Hubbard museum house in ZA. it looks like an episode of TNG fucked a vintage porn set, and it’s preserved in that state

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            28 days ago

            I don’t have friends of such tendencies

            or, perhaps better stated, I am not aware that I have such friends. and sincerely hope to avoid learning that I do

            (e: this comment came first, and is why the other came to mind)

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        28 days ago

        If either of the parties involved were just about any other science fiction author, it would be the among the least damning things I’ve heard of the other one, but it just had to be these two.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        28 days ago

        and that’s twice in as many days that I have been doing a Lady Macbeth “out, out damn spot” routine with my entire central nervous system

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    23 days ago

    HN shocked and appalled that a “founder” cannot make billions running a largely unmoderated social network without facing a few consequences:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41341353

    edit @dgerard already posted this on the top level, I just got triggered by one of the many dupe submissions on HN

    highlights include

    • standard Signal-bashing
    • comparison with other heroes like Kim Dotcom (lol) and Snowden
    • outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)
    • outrage that being a citizen of a country allows that country to enforce its laws against someone

    Durov is rich and accused in a country governed by the rule of law (in contrast to the other country which has issued him a passport, the UAE). He can afford the very best lawyers and will have to be content with staying in Paris while this works out, boo-hoo.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      23 days ago

      but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.

      ok. chill them

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      23 days ago

      outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)

      Clearly arrest warrants should be made like hide-and-seek where the seeker has to count to 100 days before arresting the hider and publish “ready or not here I come!” to their social media account.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      23 days ago

      “Hey you said I maybe killed 5 children with murder drones on a mountain could you maybe not?”

      “sorry to hear you’re not liking it! it’s currently not possible to opt out since this is just an experiment. but if you get a response that you feel is unhelpful or irrelevant, you can let us know by submitting feedback via these steps: https://goo.gle/3ySHg00”

      Oh gosh that’s such a corporate response.

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          23 days ago

          it’s absolutely fucked that the grammar and tone of Google’s response is so casual, and the proposed non-solution is so worthless, the whole post looks like parody — I was convinced @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems must have been paraphrasing til I saw the screenshot of the original post and found out it was just a straight copy and paste

          sorry you didn’t like that we implied you’re a child murderer. no takesie-backsies though! fill out this form we won’t read if you’re really sure you didn’t like our fun experiment!

          I wonder if giving responses so fucking ridiculous they look like a joke is a tactic on Google’s part to make complaints about the shit they’re doing look ridiculous and overdramatic by association

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    28 days ago

    turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      28 days ago

      it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble

      and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      28 days ago

      Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won’t be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:

      • All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren’t having their own unique dumpster fires)

      • AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order

      • Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now

      • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        28 days ago

        In retrospect google since it’s inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:

        • “how much have people linked to this?”
        • “how much have reliable sites linked to this?”
        • “how good quality are pages from this site usually?”

        (Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding “site:www.reliable-website.example” tags)

        It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.