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.)
404media posted an article absolutely dunking on the idea of pivoting to AI, as one does:
media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasn’t worked
We—yes, even you—are using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already
Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between “LLMs” and “machine learning”, but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.
It feels like gang initiation for insufferable dorks
This is pure speculation, but I suspect machine learning as a field is going to tank in funding and get its name dragged through the mud by the popping of the bubble, chiefly due to its (current) near-inability to separate itself from AI as a concept.
It’s distressingly pervasive: autocorrect, speech recognition (not just in voice assistants, in accessibility tools), image correction in mobile cameras, so many things that are on by default and “helpful”
Apparently, for some corporate customers, Outlook has automatically turned on AI summaries as a sidebar in the preview pane for inbox messages. No, nobody I’ve talked to finds this at all helpful.
A thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by “summaries” I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.
“Worse than useless” would be an understatement.
nasb, new torres piece out, promising title and opening
(I’ll have to read it after done with my present other currency-related diversions. old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud.gif)
I’ve always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I’m the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he’s saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that’s just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.
I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.
I think it’s a better way of framing things than the TESCREALs themselves use, but it still falls into the same kind of science fiction bucket imo. Like, the technology they’re playing with is nowhere near close to the level of full brain emulation or mind-machine interface or whatever that you would need to make the philosophical concerns even relevant. I fully agree with what Torres is saying here, but he doesn’t mention that the whole affair is less about building the Torment Nexus and more about deflecting criticism away from the real and demonstrable costs and harms of the way AI systems are being deployed today.
I like how quoting Grimes lyrics makes the banality of these people thuddingly clear.
I wanna be software The best design Infinite princess Computer mind
Substituting this for the text whenever I see Sammy Boy say something again
Those opening Peter Thiel quotes… Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.
Yud:
ChatGPT has already broken marriages, and hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.
And suddenly I realized that I never want to hear a Rationalist say the words “mating pool”.
(I fired up xcancel to see if any of the usual suspects were saying anything eminently sneerable. Yudkowsky is re-xitting Hanania and some random guy who believes in g. Maybe he should see if the Pioneer Fund will bankroll publicity for his new book…)
hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool
Can’t remove them if they were never in it.
mating pool
probably on par with the other stuff you might see at a rationalist poly compound
Good news for women, less risk of the pool needing to be drained because someone crapped in it again.
hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.
Wasn’t the “problem” that there’s too many men in the mating pool and women are “alphamaxxing” or whatever the fuck to get the highest quality dick? Shouldn’t this be a good thing for incels like Hanania.
OpenAI claims that their AI can get a gold medal on the International Mathematical Olympiad. The public models still do poorly even after spending hundreds of dollars in computing costs, but we’ve got a super secret scary internal model! No, you cannot see it, it lives in Canada, but we’re gonna release it in a few months, along with GPT5 and Half-Life 3. The solutions are also written in an atrociously unreadable manner, which just shows how our model is so advanced and experimental, and definitely not to let a generous grader give a high score. (It would be real interesting if OpenAI had a tool that could rewrite something with better grammar, hmmm…) I definitely trust OpenAI’s major announcements here, they haven’t lied about anything involving math before and certainly wouldn’t have every incentive in the world to continue lying!
It does feel a little unfortunate that some critics like Gary Marcus are somewhat taking OpenAI’s claims at face value, when in my opinion, the entire problem is that nobody can independently verify any of their claims. If a tobacco company released a study about the effects of smoking on lung cancer and neglected to provide any experimental methodology, my main concern would not be the results of that study.
This result has me flummoxed frankly. I was expecting Google to get a gold medal this year since last year they won a silver and were a point away from gold. In fact, Google did announce after the fact that they had won gold.
But the OAI claim is that they have some secret sauce that allowed a “pure” llm to win gold and that the approach is totally generic- no search or tools like verifiers required. Big if true but ofc no one else is allowed to gaze at the mystery machine.
Also funny aside, the guy who lead the project was poached by the zucc. So he’s walking out the front door with the crown jewels lmaou.
New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting “The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI”
found on reddit. posted without further comment
Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably won’t be filling those positions any time soon.
As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.
My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.
In short, before software started eating all the stuff “design” meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.
The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.
p.s. sorry to spam. :)
vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/8ffce464/tech-as-anti-design
threads bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148
Democratizing graphic design, Nashville style
Description: genAI artifact depicting guitarist Slash as a cat, advertising a public appearance by a twitter poster. The event is titled “TURDFEST 2025”. Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl, which seems like a missed opportunity tbh.
Turdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
Intentionally being on Broadway at 1-4 PM on a Sunday is a whole vibe, and that’s before considering whatever the fuck this is.
The whole thing screams old people desperately trying to be edge and cool but missing all the signifiers. A 'bad’word but baby talk style (like a young child saying poop), reference to slash which was already dated when I was young, the time of day so people can arrive home early and still make dinner (and not late at night like the cool music thing). The headliner is a twitter microceleb and not an actual cool band. But hey, at least kid rock isnt attending, so it escapes the 100% poser feeling.
What in the world is a catturd2 public appearance like, anyway? This sad, drunk old loser shouting random slurs at the crowd?
I can answer that, as turdstock 2024 is on yt, it seems this john rich guy talking about how much he likes catturd, begging for donations (while saying fema is bad), some people spending a lot of time saying nothing (I’m skimming past and there is so much nothing being said), and some country songs (which is not my genre, did notice that for one guy the mix was off, making the music/singing bad to hear, so well done tech team there (they fix it later but still)). And then I saw the audience (they also said millions watched catturd 2023, which considering this vid has 9k views, and there are like 100 people in the audience I doubt (checked turdstock 2023, which seems to only be on rumble 223k views. So lol, double lol, saw the same fucking artists (and the for the same guy the technical issues, poor guy) (and wow rumble sucks compared to yt)). There actually also don’t seem to be that many songs, think half the time was people talking. Also, No Catturd appearance from what I can tell (E: he is there, he just doesn’t do anything it seems, he prob speaks a few minutes I guess). Also really weird bit about how somebody send a mean facebook post and facebook went ‘are you sure this is mean’ and they went all ‘zuck was never punched in the face on the playground … the founding fathers … there was a patriot girl … [5 minutes of talking] … when those redcoats moved on us … etc (this bit took 20 minutes between songs)’. There is also a guy praying for various things on stage, angry raised catholic noises
But yes, can’t judge it on the music, as an event it seemed boring as fuck, too much talking, not enough music, boring audience (none of who were holding drinks), weird political message. Rather watch Kreator for 4 hours, which considering some of the speech clips I hear, seems to be the message they were going for. Somehow the geriatrics in the audience are the most dangerous people because they only want to be left alone (??). No lightshow, no stage presence, no skulls, no fireworks (this is both a comment on the lack of fireworks, and a general comment on what I saw).
Anyway, seems my initial feeling of massive uncool stands.
Also seem they reused the slash cat AI image for 2025.Nope different cat, just same AI slop shit.E: “Ticket Price: $199 plus taxes and fees.” WHAT Wacken metalfest costs 333,00 € and that is for a whole weekend (and actually has a real Slash).
lol holy shit
Thank you for your service!
What is esp interesting is how they make this event sound bigger than it is. The venue is small, but that makes the ‘it was sold out’ show up sooner (also less hard to find enough people who would chuck down 200 bucks for this shit), but then they make claims about the livestream numbers. (which are going to be hard to check) etc. Weird sort of radicalization way to make people think there are more people in their movement than there are. Bit like going ‘catturd2 has 4m followers!’ like those numbers mean much online, esp on zombie twitter (see also John Rich has 150k subs on yt, but averages to 10k plays per non-music video at a quick glance (his music songs do very well however at millions per views (the one song I listened to was also about how Jesus was coming back soon to punish all the evildoers))), so people like the music+message in the music, but not when the guy actually opens his mouth for other stuff, all very vibes stuff. But also just how few actual music is being played vs people making nonsense talks about America/whatever. (and also listening to his live performance, I don’t think John Rich is a good musician (at least not live, the yt clips of him are pretty good, so either he was having a bad day, or autotune stuff).
And it wasn’t that hard, not like I spend that much time on it, it is quite interesting in a way, to look at these kinds of movements and try to see past their propganda and notice who they actually reach and what they do and say. And considering the people they attracted it feels very much a last attempt from a dying generation whos sun has set. (but that could also just be because younger people aren’t as easily scammed into giving away 200 bucks for this).
Also, the cat doesn’t appear to be polydactyl
truth in advertising: they’re hinting what the music will sound like
Fucking monodactyl ass cat
The curl Bug Bounty is getting flooded with slop, and the security team is prepared to do something drastic to stop it. Going by this specific quote, reporters falling for the hype is a major issue:
As a lot of these reporters seem to genuinely think they help out, apparently blatantly tricked by the marketing of the AI hype-machines, it is not certain that removing the money from the table is going to completely stop the flood. We need to be prepared for that as well. Let’s burn that bridge if we get to it.
Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.
I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.
Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”
At that point, I feel the team would be justified in telling these slop-porters to go fuck themselves and closing the report - they’ve made it crystal clear they’re beyond saving.
(And on a wider note, I suspect the security team is gonna be a lot less willing to give benefit of the doubt going forward, considering the slop-porters are actively punishing them for doing so)
It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.
Guys, how about we made the coming computer god a fan of Robert Nozick, what could go wrong?
I expect the time right around when the first ASI gets built to be chaotic, unstable, and scary
Somebody should touch grass, or check up on the news.
Tried to read that on a train. Resulted in a nap. Probably more productive use of time anyway.
I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.
It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)
Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.
On a product page I then saw:
Material: gefühlt
This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.
So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.
And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.
And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?
aliexpress did that since forever but you can just set display language once and you’re done. these ai-dubs are probably worst so far but can be turned off by uploader (it’s opt-out) (for now)
An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions
I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.
Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?
Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shittm and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.
Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as “Bleib für immer am Leben”, guess they named it “Stay Forever Live”? No way to know for sure, of course.
Click here if you want a horribly bad translation in your face
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?
This really gets on my nerves too. They probably came up with the idea that they could increase time spent on their platforms and thus revenue by providing more content in their users’ native languages (especially non-English). Simply forcing it on everyone, without giving their users a choice, was probably the cheapest way to implement it. Even if this annoys most of their user base, it makes their investors happy, I guess, at least over the short term. If this bubble has shown us anything, it is that investors hardly care whether a feature is desirable from the users’ point of view or not.
if it’s opt-out, it also keeps use of the shitty ai dubbing high thus making it an artficial use case. it’s like with gemini counting every google search as single use of it
btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.
Ah, im not the only one, yes very annoying. I wonder if there isn’t also a setting they can ask the browsers about the users preferred language usage. Like how you can change languages on a windows install and some installers/etc follow that preferred language.
Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611
Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.
. . .
Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.
taking a wild guess it’s Yudkowsky. “very knowledgeable people” and “many/most experts” is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.
even among people critical of AI (who don’t otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it’s frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I’m more nitpicking than anything because it’s not usually their most important issue, and maybe it’s useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I’m not really familiar with Bernie Sanders’ takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don’t know if that makes sense, I’m very tired
Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the “AI” into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.
Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.
Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:
You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.
I’m not comfortable saying that consciousness and subjectivity can’t in principle be created in a computer, but I think one element of what this whole debate exposes is that we have basically no idea what actions makes consciousness happen or how to define and identify that happening. Chatbots have always challenged the Turing test because they showcase how much we tend to project consciousness into anything that vaguely looks like it (interesting parallel to ancient mythologies explaining the whole world through stories about magic people). The current state of the art still fails at basic coherence over shockingly small amounts of time and complexity, and even when it holds together it shows a complete lack of context and comprehension. It’s clear that complete-the-sentence style pattern recognition and reproduction can be done impressively well in a computer and that it can get you farther than I would have thought in language processing, at least imitatively. But it’s equally clear that there’s something more there and just scaling up your pattern-maximizer isn’t going to replicate it.
Haven’t really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI or Anthropic) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.
I had to attend a presentation from one of these guys, trying to tell a room full of journalists that LLMs could replace us & we needed to adapt by using it and I couldn’t stop thinking that an LLM could never be a trans journalist, but it could probably replace the guy giving the presentation.
