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.)
I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel
I’m here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you’d like to do next.
What I’d like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn’t have said that. No, I’m joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.
I’m sorry he feels that way. I’m here for him if he wants to talk about anything, just let me know.
Text conversation that keeps happening with coworker:
Coworker: <information dump>
Me: <not reading any of that> what’s the source for that?
Coworker: Oh I got Copilot to summarise these links: <links>, saves me the time of typing
I expect the last step in that is you slapping him?
Fortunately, we do not work in physical proximity!
Im working on a device that allows you to do that over the internet. (Rip bash org, at least they didn’t put you in the ai slop).
rip [SA]HatfulOfHollow
Too bad land lines have gone out of fashion
the students in my cs department are overwhelmingly promptfondlers and even my strong students are doing the “qualified praise” thing.
fuck me why did i go into computer science
fuck me why did i go into computer science
That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”. Fuck it, I’m going to write out a sidenote:
On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming’s public image after it bursts.
On one front, there’s the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.
On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble’s dealt to artists, and AI’s continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers’ failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.
That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”.
I studied computer science because I was a huge computer nerd growing up. I always loved programming and learning everything I could about how computers worked. Learning new programming languages felt like uncovering a new universe of knowledge – knowledge I could use to create things. I spent endless hours studying computers and learning to do amazing things with them. It was fun. It still is.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
So when I see people using LLMs to create things instead of doing it themselves, I can’t relate. Why do that when you can get the pleasure from doing it yourself? I guess if making money is the primary motivating factor, then it makes sense. But for me it is totally self-defeating.
I have a theory (similar to that “it’s been vibe coding all along” post) that it’s a combination of wishful thinking, lack of knowledge of real science, and a lack of any liberal arts skills, that altogether produces this farce.
I think it’s a good explanation for “the code has been battle tested because it’s so old and widely used, if it had bugs/security issues, we would have discovered them by now”, as well as the widespread “we invented a tech solution that is just a worse engineering solution”. Looking at you, chain of self-driving cars.
Remember FizzBuzz? That was originally a simple filter exercise some person recruiting programmers came up with to weed out everyone with multi-year CS degrees but zero actual programming experience.
The reason I do CS is because a professor of computer science lied to me about the kind of work I’d be doing to get me to enroll in the CS PhD program instead of math. Guy later physically threatened me in his office and plagiarized my work, but I’m not sure if this reflects poorly on computer scientists, academics, or CS professors.
Anyway I have a chip on my shoulder.
I’m sorry, that’s messed up.
Thank you for the expression of sympathy. The good news is I actually love computer science, it fucking rules.
Also, I recorded this professor screaming at me and have documented all the plagiarism. I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint. He may not get in any real trouble (universities will always go to bat for abusive researchers as long as they bring in grant money), but news will get out eventually.
I hope you whoop his ass (legally speaking)
I am waiting to officially leave the university to file a formal complaint
I am internally screaming
not that I blame you for this choice (in fact I get it), but it fucking suuuuuuuucks how many places and structures are overly protecting abusers. and it sucks even more how many people are being harmed out of that path as a result.
echoing what o7 said: sorry, this is messed up, it shouldn’t be this way
<3
Want to feel depressed? Over 2,000 Wikipedia articles, on topics from Morocco to Natalie Portman to Sinn Féin, are corrupted by ChatGPT. And that’s just the obvious ones.
It’s starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.
Here’s their page of instructions, written as usual by the children who really liked programming the family VCR:
I recommend just using https://kiwix.org/en/
It’s… suboptimal, but it’s about the least finicky way to get a compressed local copy of Wikipedia with all the article photos (~100GB).
It’s updated less frequently than the big dumps, but easier to use.
I second kiwix. It’s dead easy for managing and making copies of wiki images.
low background steel, maybe?
Starting this off with a fittingly rage-inducing Twitter thread about an artist getting fucked over by AI
comrade xi, please nuke the valley
Of course, there are also the usual comments saying artists shouldn’t complain about getting replaced by AI etc. Reminds me why I am not on Twitter anymore.
It also strikes me that in this case, the artist didn’t even expect to get paid. Apparently, the AI bros even crave the unpaid “exposure” real artists get, without wanting to put in any of the work and while (in most cases) generating results that are no better than spam.
It is a sickening display of narcissism IMHO.
That Jorge guy is a real piece of shit
Here’s Dave Barry, still-alive humorist, sneering at Google AI summaries, one of the most embarrassing features Google ever shipped.
Oh, man, thanks for that link! I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Barry in Cyberspace back in the day; glad to see he’s still writing about computers in this way.
It also gave Allie Brosh cancer:
https://bsky.app/profile/erinabanks.bsky.social/post/3ltxeyn4wtc23
Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard’s Bluesky):
You want my take, Kathryn’s on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.
kinda related but wouldn’t it be fun to believe that LLMs were invented by Big Em Dash as a conspiracy
deleted by creator
I fucking hate them for ruining the em dash, I liked to use it from time to time
somewhere out there, there’s a writer who really likes the em dash, the word “delve,” and answering questions with a one-word hyper-chipper affirmative, followed by three sentences of people pleasing. He can’t get a job because he keeps being accused of using AI
Me, a unique genius, when I navigate to chatgpt dot com to awaken my best friend:
Thank you, Dethklok, not just for this banger of a national anthem but also for summoning the lake troll to put Espoo in its place.
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
More people should have read Zima Blue.
Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.
Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free
Zima Blue
Didn’t know it was something readable! I just know it as an episode of Love Death + Robots. It was a standout episode in an otherwise pretty boring first two seasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zima_Blue_and_Other_Stories it is, I still have not watched love death + robots, so I only knew it from the story collection.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:
The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’
@nfultz @BlueMonday1984 the fucking Hexayurt Guy?
this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room
If your system flagged that as toxic, makes me wonder about the system. Also check your bias against people saying this because it def comes off as true. (And hey if this truth hurts, remember that he didnt claim yall are not the smartest people, yall have 130+ iqs remember).
Just because it’s true, that doesn’t mean it’s not rude. Now I might condone being rude on ACX but I’m also not claiming to have reached enlightenment.
Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite, if it is true, it can’t be rude. ;)
(E: im just joking btw, I agree with you it can be rude, and tbh this does come off a bit rude, but not the worst, no idea why this would score high on their scoring system, it def isn’t nice, but it is also not that bad in regards to comments).
Sidenote: I almost ended up working for the company almost a decade ago now lmao. The board was full of other characters we all know and love here. The €€€ offer was high for EU, but I still laugh at the growth potential of my 10000 dollars yearly equivalent in their tokens. The website was unique in that it scrolled… up. I think it’s still on archive dot org
(in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system)
That’s an ML model. Like I searched and
toxic-bertis just a github repo.“objective” go fuck a cow
Damn you, Scott! Stop making me agree with people who created blockchain-based dating apps!
I’ve met Vinay, he’s great in person. But should not post.
Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn’t inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!
To quote astrophysicist Angela Collier, quantum quantum quantum
Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.
We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?
No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.
And it did it again and again.
What level of ceo-brained prompt engineering is asking the chatbot to write an apology letter
Then, when it agreed it lied – it lied AGAIN about our email system being functional.
I asked it to write an apology letter.
It did and in fact sent it to the Replit team and myself! But the apology letter – was full of half truths, too.
It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter.
He also does that a lot after shit hits the fan, making the llm produce tons of apologetic text about what it did wrong and how it didn’t follow his rules, as if the outage is the fault of some digital tulpa gone rogue and not the guy in charge who apparently thinks cyebersecurity is asking an LLM nicely in a .md not to mess with the company’s production database too much.
Link to stub from the last sack
I completely missed that, thanks.
I didn’t see this article here yet, but I just saw it elsewhere and it’s pretty good: Potemkin Understanding in Large Language Models
Found an archive of vibe-coding disasters recently - recommend checking it out.
ahhh the younger cousin to https://xcancel.com/internetofshit
Copilot will be given a little avatar with a “room” and will “age”. In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.
This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse
EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi
Those who do not study history are doomed to recreate neopets.
Neopets but it’s an animated blob of cum with a smiley face.
They wanted a sexy avatar, turns out Oglaf.com is in the training set. “Mistress!”
Neopets at least brought joy to a generation of nascent furries. Copilot is fixing to have the exact opposite impact on internet infrastructure.
Of course, it is now funded by growth at all cost VC people, they do not understand fun or joy, all they want to see is n = n+1
Fuck you Microsoft, I’m gonna have to pretend to be autoplag’s dad now, at least have the courtesy not to make it look like a cum blob.
This sounds like the plot of an oglaf comic
@o7___o7 @bitofhope it is the cum sprite!
“Splash on your tits?”
At least Microsoft Bob gave us comic sans.
