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.)

  • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    5 days ago

    There’s not a whole lot of clear info out there but it looks like the Tesla “dog mode” (the feature you’re supposed to rely on when you leave a dog in the car so the dog doesn’t overheat and die) is prone to failure and has recently killed a dog.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Promptfondlers on lobste.rs are unhappy about the tag “vibecoding”, used to denote development using GenAI. I’d not recommend reading the thread, just want to observe that if slop coding had actually taken the coding world by storm, I doubt there would be much pearl clutchign about how slop-slingers are treated on the site. We’re talking about people willing to pay Scam Altman money monthly after all.

    https://lobste.rs/s/gkzmfy/let_s_rename_vibecoding_tag_llms

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      given the run rates all these fuckers have, I half expect they feel glad it’s “as low as it is”. couple of the authors I’ve seen speak about it reckon pay out better to them (once off) than they tend to get from book royalties (I saw chisnall and some others post around it earlier). precedent from this is probably a good thing, even if I wish it went harder (esp given how likely “a fine you can afford is just a tax” is to develop as a normal situation)

      re burn rates: openai confirmed in the last day or so that it expects a $118b burn through 2028. fucking obscene

      • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        According to the article, it could be higher than 1.5 billion, though by how much they don’t really say. But they’re estimating about $3000 per book. For a class action that actually seems extremely high.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          6 days ago

          But compared to the anti piracy fines for sharing music from decades ago it is pretty low.

          Saw people suggest it was because the judge doesnt want to kill the goose that is laying pyrite eggs.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          7 days ago

          yep, I was seeing some folks reckon it might be 20~30x what they’d make in later royalties. I’m not knocking the suit or the value to authors - mostly just wishing it were more so it might cause an even sharper effect

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    there’s a place called r/nuclearweapons where people come, collect declassified and FOIA’d info, do some maths and speculate on how nukes work. 7d ago they had an incident where reddit admin removed a couple of posts from one user https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n4c1i3/we_had_a_thing_happen/ head mod stepped down in a response

    four days later this thing surfaced https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n75vej/our_schmuck_from_doge/ linked article https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5464437-ai-nuclear-weapon-detection/

    so probable sequence of events is that someone from anthropic talked up some bozo from doe or somewhere else, bozo from doe ran confabulation engine on some part of internet, and then notified/threatened reddit admin, who complied by removing some rando’s account. whoa they must have saved quadrillions of americans by that brave action

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      96% accuracy. So… unusable. That is an extremely high rate of failure.

      Imagine how often it triggers on just people talking about hearts of iron 4 alone.

      E: read more about it:

      we achieved a 94.8% detection rate for nuclear weapons queries and zero false positives

      ‘zero false positives’ Sure bud.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      why is everything about these people so fucking stupid

      access to nukes is limited by availability of fissile material. not maths of it, not supremely complex engineering because it’s not that hard, not by money, not by access to ores, not anything else. it just requires one of two very specific, expensive and slightly dangerous to operate facilities which is well within budget of any serious state actor and unless diplomatic or military action is taken, a state that decides to get nukes will get them. this is the case now and has been for the last 50 years or so

      but yeah some idiots wowed by chatbot will Save the World. this also puts that weird block on claude’s biology topic filter in much stupider and doomerist light e: it does not escape my attention that thehill ran an article based entirely on anthropic blog post

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    I was thinking about ethics in game journalism in software engineering and I think it might be easier to create a whitelist than a blacklist:

    What are some serious software/hardware companies that have NOT participated in the AI bubble? No AI nonsense in their marketing slides, no mentions of AI on their landing page, etc.

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      Gonna cheat a little bit and put one-woman consultancy firm/personal blog deadSimpleTech up as an example. The sole member is Iris Meredith, whose involvement begins and ends at publicly lambasting AI’s continued shittiness.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        I was planning to mention Procreate as well, but felt like that’d be spamming the replies a bit.

        On a wider note, I expect it’ll be primarily art-related software/hardware companies that will have avoided AI participation - with how utterly artists have rejected the usage of AI, and resisted its intrusion into their spaces, the companies working with them likely view rejecting AI as an easy way of earning good PR with their users, and embracing it as a business liability at best, and a one-way trip past the trust thermocline at worst.

  • dnn25519@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    As a CS student, I wonder why us and artists are always the one who are attacked the most whenever some new “insert tech stuff” comes out. And everyone’s like: HOLY SHIT PROGRAMMERS AND ARTISTS ARE DEAD, without realizing that most of these things are way too crappy to actually be… good enough to replace us?

    • Alex@lemmy.vgEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      My guess would be because most people don’t understand what you all actually do so gen AI output looks to them like their impression of the work you do. Just look at the game studios replacing concept artists with Midjourney, not grasping what concept art even is for and screwing up everyone’s workflow as a result.

      I’m neither a programmer nor an artist I can sorta understand how people get fooled. Show me a snippet of nonsense code or image and I’ll nod along if you say it’s good. But then as a writer (even if only hobbyist) I am able to see how godawful gen AI writing is whereas some non-writers won’t, and so I extrapolate from that since it’s not good at the thing I have domain expertise in, it probably isn’t good at the things I don’t understand.

      • stormeuh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        11 days ago

        I feel like aggressive proponents of genAI are so because they are intimidated and/or jealous of the people they say they will replace. They lack the skills and critical thinking to become good at the task they want to replace, but also unwilling or unable to put in the work.

        Instead of reckoning with this, they construct a phantasm where artists are “gatekeeping art”, and genAI is going to disrupt that gatekeeping. Meanwhile I think deep down they know that what genAI produces is derivative by definition, and not “real art” by any means.

  • Don Piano@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Kind of generic: I am a researcher and recently started a third party funded project where I won’t teach for a while. I kinda dread what garbage fire I’ll return to in a couple of years when I teach again, how much AI slop will be established on the sides of teachers and students.

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    10 days ago

    Not worthy of a third post imho, but Scott made the trilogy post: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9108 where he is subtlety walking back his insane, proudly kid killing claim to the more reasonable, Israel needs to defeat hamas, claim.

    For a man angry about his detractors being intellectually dishonest(**), this is very typical:

    Incredibly, commenters on Peter Woit’s blog then blamed me for this antisemitic image, mistakenly imagining that I’d created it myself, and then used their false assumption as further proof of my mental illness

    For context, it was an AI slop image, and he named it after Woit, and didn’t provide any details from the email itself. While the whole affair is quite a good reason to at least put this persons name/email out there imho.

    But also:

    I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]

    His ability to lack self-awareness and reading skills remains bad. The power thing was partially in his first blogpost already, where he realized the ‘manhaters’ were just a small group. And the latter makes no sense unless you hold the random cartoon guy (who nobody here or at Woit expressed support for) as the consensus, and actual sc people, or fans of Peter.

    The last part is just nuts, whole bit of Rationalization why he is actually justified, and will change the world. Not realizing everyone was horrified because he created a thought experiment to justify a genocide:

    Reading the SneerClubbers’ armchair diagnoses of my severe mental illness, paranoia, persecution complex, grandiosity, etc. etc. I had the following thought, paraphrasing Shaw:

    Yes, they’re absolutely right that psychologically well-adjusted people generally do figure out how to adapt themselves to the reigning morality of their social environment—as indicated by the Asch conformity test, the Milgram electric-shock experiment, and the other classics of social psychology.

    It takes someone psychologically troubled, in one way or another, to persist in trying to adapt the reigning morality of their social environment to themselves.

    If so, however, this suggests that all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people—a realization for which I’m deeply grateful.

    this bit opens up so much questions, remarks and is just silly in some ways. Yes people who are dissatisfied will push for change, why is this a revelation? But do they have the power? Is it justified? Jared Taylor(*) also pushes for a changed morality system, but I wouldn’t consider that desirable. It also leaves out that people will push for change because they just want to profit from it. Which is likely a lot bigger driver of change see the libertarian ls pushing for less regulations, because the dumb and distracted deserve to be scammed.

    Anyway we got called out twice!

    *: a white nationalist piece of shit who from what I heard is notable because compared to his peers he isnt a raging anti-Semite. At least not openly. **: Edit: as nobody mentioned the whole ‘Peter is intellectually dishonest’ affair, I have to say one thing. Peter is imho not intellectually dishonest for leaving out that the people who tie their children on the traintrack could stop at any time. The people who don’t mention this just don’t think it is a convincing argument. Yes people who take hostages could release the hostages at any time, still no reason to shoot through the hostages. Derail the trolley! The way Russia dealt with the Opera hostage crisis was considered bad for a reason (I hope I don’t have to point out that the hostage takers also were in the wrong here). Forgot who it was who mentioned it here, but the whole ‘I would be glad to not flip the switch’ is one of the fucked up parts, it would scar people for life to make that choice.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. […]

      Honestly what he should actually be grateful for is how all his notoriety ever amounted to[1] was a couple of obscure forums going ‘look at this dumb asshole’ and moving on.

      He is an insecure and toxic serial overreactor with shit opinions and a huge unpopular-young-nerd chip on his shoulder, and who comes off as being one mildly concerted troll effort away from a psych ward at all times. And probably not even that, judging from Graham Linehan’s life trajectory.

      [1] besides Siskind using him to broaden his influence on incels and gamer gaters.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        8 days ago

        I feel like he’s also broadly misunderstood the actual armchair diagnosis from over here. Like, no acknowledgement of claims that he’s stuck in a broken and obviously false framing of the entire world as “popular jocks” vs “put-up on nerds” and seems to match literally any conflict into that model to often horrifying results. Even though that was the main thrust of the actual “diagnosis” that he referenced.

        Past a certain point I think anyone who doesn’t agree with and support him has been fully excluded from the circle of people who can actually get through to him and help. Unfortunately, he’s still a public figure, leaving the rest of us with little to do beyond sneering.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        While this is close to ‘look at what you made me do territory’. We would sneer a lot less at him if he didn’t blame us for everything. ‘people who sneer made covid worse’ (not the direct quote) for example was just silly, and if you look at the reaction of sneerclub at the time also not in the realm of reality. (But yes he will just say he said sneer by which he didn’t mean sneerclub but people like us in general. Which is obv not a thing I fully agree with, but good motte/bailey).

        It also is interesting, as Scott compared to the others we sneer at never really seems to break containment so to speak. I have seen people talk about Aella on bsky for example, Scott Alexander, Eliezer, lesswrong, EA, etc all come up. But Scott almost never does. (Yes, the ‘untitled’ affair was public, but that was a decade ago, and 6 months before r/sneerclub was created (and long before I joined) and also the whole broaden influence thing as you mentioned). And after all why should he, he is just a random professor, the only reason he is relevant for the broader picture is that he agrees with the AI doom stuff, and he gives the LW people some level of prestige (the only times I have brought him up is because he confirmed that Yarvin spends time personally emailing prestigious people like him but that is about Moldy). He is prob the only one whos sneering is just contained to sneerclub/awful.systems (which is why he should stop reading sc, he prob should also ignore more blog comments and emails (block Yarvin’s email Scott, do it!)).

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Gonna repost a bit from comment I left on reddit:

      Anyway, something useful perhaps, the World Central Kitchen seems to help out with the famine so donating to them might be useful. Not comfortable donating on a link provided by a random user (smart!), or want something to show for your donation, the current Humble book bundle is donating to the WCK (do not forget to adjust the sliders) and you get a nice collection of Martha Wells books (The Murderbot saga is great). Or buy the play for peace bundle which is donating to the UNRWA USA, and get a shitton of games and other stuff. (All links are affiliate free from my end, I know there is a system setup for Humble stuff, but I don’t use that).

      E: buying the last one is also a fun way to boost yourself into Spiders Georg levels of video game ownership. So you could do it for that joke alone. Just to claim you own ~300 videogames.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        10 days ago

        I’ve followed Jose Andres on insta for about 6 years now, and while I’d love to only have nice things to say about him and WCK, I know that there is resentment/resistance to the actions of WCK, for good reason. This is the first thing that pops up, a page detailing how WCK works with the IDF and how that is not in the best interests of Palestine. What’s also really gross, ghoulish and troublesome is that, despite the fact that Israel has literally killed WCK volunteers, Andres still works with them, and is largely pro-israel. That being said, everything about this is fucked anyway and I imagine that if you’re donating, your heart is in the right place. But, uh, yeah, adjust those sliders.

        E: ok I have fully read the page. Fuck Andres, fuck WCK, please do not donate to them. Donate to UNRWA instead, or any organisation that is actually willing to call what Israel is doing a genocide.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      10 days ago

      Shamelessly reproduced from the other place:

      A quick summary of his last three posts:

      “Here’s a thought experiment I came up with to try to justify the murder of tens of thousands of children.”

      “Lots of people got mad at me for my last post; have you considered that being mad at me makes me the victim and you a Nazi?”

      “I’m actually winning so much right now: it’s very normal that people keep worriedly speculating that I’ve suffered some sort of mental breakdown.”

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    0·
    9 days ago

    one horse laugh is of greater utilitarian impact across the quantum waveform of the universe than ten thousand syllogisms