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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • gerikson@awful.systems
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    3 hours ago

    NYT: “Microsoft and OpenAI’s Close Partnership Shows Signs of Fraying” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html)

    Archive: https://archive.ph/Bas23

    HN link from whence I got this, have not mined this for sneers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41878281

    edit oh wait found one

    OpenAI’s revenue isn’t from advertising, it should be slightly easier for them to resist the call of enshittification this early in the company history.

    Can’t enshittify that which is already shit

    Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership) and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates. Both times I turned to ChatGPT and it gave me an answer immediately

    Just a normal hackernews, testing if the models they use are racist

    Well, at this point most new data being created is conversations with chatgpt, seeing as how stack overflow and reddit are increasingly useless, so their conversation logs are their moat.

  • o7___o7@awful.systems
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    19 hours ago

    Over on /r/politics, there are several users clamoring for someone to feed the 1900 page independent counsel report into an LLM, which is an interesting instance of second-order laziness.

    They also seem convinced that NotebookLLM is incapable of confabulation which is hilarious and sad. Could it be sneaky advertising?

    • self@awful.systems
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      13 hours ago

      That’s amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!

      I can’t decide what’s worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like I’m about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you don’t have and events that didn’t happen

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      22 hours ago

      Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.

      • swlabr@awful.systems
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        19 hours ago

        I know you probably had no intention behind the number, but I just had to check. 2686 days ago was 12 June 2017. Pretty sure we’ve known about how google fumbles shit from way before then!

        • Mii@awful.systems
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          19 hours ago

          That was the day when the transformer paper was released that kicked off this whole LLM shitshow. So my intention was just a little nod towards that. ;)

          But yeah, the real number is probably quite a bit larger than that.

          • o7___o7@awful.systems
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            19 hours ago

            somone could make a command-line utility like sdate, but for blarney engines!

            what would be a good name for it, do you reckon? The first thing to pop into my head was shitdate but that’s too close to the original and distro maintainers might get prissy about packages with swears in them

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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      23 hours ago

      But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, y’know, engaged in conversation.

      I know chatbots don’t track meaning, but I’m pretty sure words still mean things.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        8 hours ago

        Did Sam anticipate the easily foreseeable avalanche of AI slop, decide that proof of humanity was a worthwhile investment, and only then notice that all the suggested search completions for “proof of” were crypto?

    • gerikson@awful.systems
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      18 hours ago

      Kinda surprised World(Coin) was still ongoing, thought saltman would have quietly buried the project now he’s busy shilling ChatGPT

      • istewart@awful.systems
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        14 hours ago

        The 0.000001% chance that this thing morphs into the new global reserve currency is enough for a proper rationalist to keep it trundling along, don’t you think?

        Also don’t underestimate the value of having someplace to park useful cronies you don’t currently have any other job for

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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      20 hours ago

      anyone wanna take bets on how much pearlclutching surprisedpikachu we’ll see

      I suspect we’ll see a fair amount. Giving some specifics:

      1. I suspect we’ll see Sammy accused of endangering all of humanity for a quick buck - taking Altman at his word, OpenAI is attempting to create something which they themselves believe could wipe out humanity if they screw things up.

      2. I expect calls to regulate the AI industry will louden in response to this - what Sammy’s doing here is giving the true believers more ammo to argue Silicon Valley’s may potentially trigger the robot apocalypse that Silicon Valley themselves have claimed AI is capable of unleashing.

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        20 hours ago

        perhaps saltman will have enough audacity to promote this as a way to ensure that some account is owned by a human, after flooding every corner of internet with ai slop and fake accounts

        • self@awful.systems
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          13 hours ago

          that’s almost certainly the plan — I remember there was some horrific “proof of humanity” shit tied in with this, supposedly so that you could tell if you’re interacting with a human rather than a chatbot. there’s so many problems with that technically of course, not least of which is the chatbot guy also owning the proof of not-bot, but there’s deeper horrifying implications: this is the technology conservatives have been begging for to block access to “adult sites” (see: LGBTQ+ spaces and associates) and “protect voting” (see: purge voter registries). that the technology is fucking stupid and doesn’t work doesn’t matter to them — as always with technofascism, that’s a feature.

  • self@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:

    New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

    there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics

    and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:

    After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOP
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    2 days ago

    New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

    The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion’s pretty damn good, so I’m copy-pasting it here:

    All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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      1 day ago

      It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.

      But heck it I’m (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      This sadly has caused my login problems to reappear on bsky. No idea what they are doing with their service, but I’m having regular issues with the site. Also seems ‘downforeveryoneorjustme’ enshittified. (the image is showing a part of the site which is now an advertisement for some AI bullshit chatbot/imagegenerator everything aislop roleplay thing). (seems to be fixed now, but wow did bsky have weird issues for me).

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    2 days ago

    Molly White reports on Kamala Harris’s recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.

    VP Harris’s press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.

    Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected

    […]

    Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.

    More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.

    Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.

    “regulation” here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don’t live in a sensible world.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

    • swlabr@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.

      This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        the upside of it listing a pile of author names: one can go look up their published works, and add them to crank trackers if necessary (seems likely)

        the ToC is some fantastical fucking nonsense

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      He also put ‘everything you post is now training data for ais’ in his tos apparently. So nightshade poison those images and start building a following on other sites artists. (And as a non artist, reminder to self to like and repost more artists I like).

      E: quick source

    • maol@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      This is a license for stalkers & abusers ! No surprise from someone like Elon I suppose

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      I really wonder what the meeting looked like where they decided on that change, because I’m struggling coming up with a single argument for it that doesn’t boil down to giving abusive asshats more playtime.

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        2 days ago

        my bet: tweets that came to felon’s attention which he couldn’t view because the poster had block felon

    • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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      2 days ago

      I’m really really not happy about this. There is one person I’ve been trying to keep out for the last few years and now they can come crawl all my fucking posts?? And report my account!?

      Edit: apparently being protected should offer me some protection still.