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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
The AI lawsuit’s going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:
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Chat-GPT-TFSD-21guns can have a little anthropomorphism, as a treat.
- Sam Altman, probably
Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?
Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC
Hannah Devlin is the Guardian’s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.
so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?
Yes
—What kind of gambling do you usually have here?
—Oh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.
Quick update - Brian Merchant’s list of “luddite horror” films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume “luddite horror” is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we’re gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble’s produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public’s gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, I’d love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and it’s tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant’s likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites’ image.
I suspect Silicon Valley’s godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - “machinery harmful to commonality” may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but “AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents” is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism’s hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley’s public image.
Of those two, technological determinism’s death was probably the more important one - that idea’s demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn’t inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, i’m not so sure
I’d say they did do some damage to tech’s wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Green’s Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floyd’s death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed “ownership” or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to “crypto” and were not generalized to wider tech industry
It is refreshing to see the general trend of people laughing when promptbros try to paint themselves as the Wright Brothers Reborn, isn’t it?
Going outside awful’s wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the world’d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like “whoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, we’ll get a policy in place”.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Logan’s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it’s not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.
Of course he’s also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.
Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its ✨leadership principles✨, but this seems worse.
Didn’t corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?
Dead internet? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the job hunting process?
(Github project supposedly for AI assisted mass job application, including using the AI to cater resume to job posting. God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
God I’m terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)
Absolutely. automated AI applicants getting read by automated AI parsers. It’s inanity!
One thing I hope comes out of all this nonsense is that it collapses the modern job seeing meta completely.
(I think I’ve mentioned it here before, but nonetheless)
both myself and 2 people I know were hunting last year. it’s hell (in tech, which has historically been fucking abysmal at hiring to start with). the ways this shit is going to affect other industries too…
some numbers: the one friend applied to something in the 1000 posts, the other 400-600 in the space of approx 4-5mo. both barely heard back from anyone, or if they did it was often months after. on some of mine, I got nack/followup mails approx 7-8mo after sending details. and that’s without even mentioning the utter fucking toxic dump swamp of listings…. holy shit what a mess
Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:
We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?
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which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)
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but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity
honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics
to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base
iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it’d be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn’t work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn’t
it’ll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday
If the purpose of a metric is to show adoption, the metric can be defined in a way to show adoption. Could be just an effect of promo driven culture, AI push and good’ol Goodhart’s law.
Like, how do you even measure when code is ai authored and when not. If you insert 25% of a variable name and the autocompleter guesses the rest of the name correctly, are the remaining 75% AI generated?
appparently this is use of code-complete as well
from someone on Mastodon:
Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.
If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.
I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.
I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation
(promotion driven dev)
Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.
oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit
that’s quite appealing to me ngl
God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.
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Here ya go boss, a 80% prototype solution.
/* TODO: support other element types */ unsigned int * maxsumsubarr(unsigned int arr[], size_t len, size_t * sublen) { *sublen = len; return arr; }
Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.
Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”
Olivia Squizzle followup: AI Replacement | Drawing Your Requests
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this, but its always nice to see someone actively piss all over AI in this manner.
beat me by seconds.
She’s incredible
Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.
The new self-checkout process is as follows:
- Scan your item
- Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
- Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
- Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
- GOTO 1
Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.
sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)
I wonder when the management will figure out these rigid anti theft systems cost a lot more than they save.
On that note, think i figured out a way to get free products on the lidl checkout. There was a large amount of errors (some of which caused by me by accident). And required help a couple of times and later i realized that i had paid less than expected. Not sure if it is reproducable, as that would be stealing, or trying to get hired as a red teamer.
I call this the law of conservation of complexity
a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles
…but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.
we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull
mainevery time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty uniquethe pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web
the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic??? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.
this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?
also, what’s a funny subdomain for this kind of thing?
mouthful.awful.systems
gibberish.awful.systems, to form GAS
scribes.ofdamn
I want that album
@self If you fork/make a custom version of the software will you call it WriteAwfully
WritePhilthily
Love it.
manuals.awful.systems
NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle’s latest video “Big Tech is Going Nuclear!” (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it’s an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant “well, done with you” - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I’m sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people
And this puts the bit from the other video with the referral links into context. It’s not a joke, he actually expects to be making money off of people :(. I found the vagueness in the ad jarring too. There’s this thing called sponsorblock, a database of timestamps for videos that skips useless stuff. The downside is you don’t find out if the guy that you’re watching is a shill.
The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
The term “AI” damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.
I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction’s coming true.
Ok, but are you suggesting he was duped?
The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.
sorry if my reply sounded rude. I didn’t mean it to be. I just saw it again and it sounds dismissive.
Yeah, I get what you’re saying but I’d really have to stretch my benefit-of-the-doubt muscles to consider someone who makes such well-researched videos wouldn’t go to the website before he reads the url out on his video and see that on the homepage, above the fold, in big letters, it says “Powered by AI”
maybe reach out and ask? might be interesting to see the answer
(if you care to, anyway)
It’s definitely the prudent option but I’m over mental capacity and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sharing this just for the upvotes. I couldn’t see any mentions of the sponsor in the comments, so I guess the audience, at least, were duped. I already have a string of unanswered questions on ecosia’s greenwashing social posts, though
yep, I getcha.
I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.
Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.
i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty
it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you
…I feel like there’s a story here.
camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.
my current box is the descendant of that one
this is what the cloud and its enshittification has taken from us
shared root on ad-hoc hardware doing fuck knows what (but it’s probably lemonparty)
these days lemonparty would be a (ahahahaha) docker image (fnarr etc)
did y’all see bash.org looks to maybe finally have died died? there’s an archive up somewhere at least but rip to a bastion
(this thought comes to mind because I instantly wanted to link “our thoughts go out to the recent victims of internet fraud”…)
A couple months ago I lobbied for (and won) my weekly trivia team to use the name “mike’s hard lemonparty”
Then I learned exactly how old I was
Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/
we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other
anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:
The error message ‘userld and score are required’ is unclear. It should be more specific, such as ‘Missing userld or score in the request body’.
aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?
- a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
- a machine can’t read this
- if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency
I want someone to fork the Linux kernel and then unleash like 10 Copilots to make PRs and review each other. No human intervention. Then plot the number of critical security vulnerabilities introduced over time, assuming they can even keep it compilable for long enough.
Does a kernel that crashes itself before it can process any malicious inputs count as secure?
Technically yes, but a rock is even more secure and cheaper than a computer and a programmer
Sshh don’t tell the investors, I’ve managed to be paid for a decade by updating my code to work with other people updating their code to work with other people updating their code, all without actually doing anything new.
We as a profession have developed a careful balancing act where we’re always busy doing nothing. If the balance was off just a little someone might actually have to think about new features instead of, say, migrating from CGI to PHP to JavaScript to jQuery to AngularJS to Angular to React to ???, rejecting LLM generated changes, “fixing” the same bug year after year, or reverting reverts of reverts of reverts of reverts of changes.
And thinking is hard.
that’d be an interesting experiment but also that’s $2400 you could spend on more useful things, like bootstrapping your whiskey collection
$2400 is hardly a number compared to whatever we’re already spending on genAI so fuck it
@self did somebody make an extension that replaces github copilot with ELIZA yet
