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.)
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: it’s not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way – “it’s inevitable”, “it’s here to stay”, etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter – what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population
AI’s already destroying people’s cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn’t be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it’ll fuck up human’s capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Thankfully, I’ve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
- AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
- The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
- The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you’d have zero shot of turning a profit.
(That I’m a NEET also helps (can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P
I’d certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn’t work for a big tech company that’s gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don’t want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I’d be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don’t quit for complicated reasons. I’m not that far from the breaking point, but I’m going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, I’m pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was “they are good, none of them will use AI”.
So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesn’t want to end up in a group with kids that won’t contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today “contribute” AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.
Dad hi-five
Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.
Oh good, a web design crime that never ends.
Of course it’s a React, Tailwind piece of shit hosted on Vercel.
Vercel? What’s the ver stand for? (jk)
verifiably celibate
A corruption of VCRcel, somebody with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1990s pornography distributed on VHS.
Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.
Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:
I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.
text of tweet inside image
From @BootsRiley:
Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.
He just looks like a hippie.
i recently stumbled upon his “tetragrammaton” podcast on youtube, listening to the episode with soad’s daron malakian, which was actually very interesting.
then i had a look at what other interviews were on offer. among popular actors and musicians there are such luminaries as: palmer luckey, peter thiel, mark mcafee (apparrently some raw milk tycoon), jay bhattacharya (covid-19 hoaxer type guy i guess), mr eggman himself, etc etc
on the podcast rubin comes off as this cool, open-minded hippie person, “just asking questions” and “having a conversation” with interesting people. so i guess he’s just sort of following the rogan formula. except i think rubin has a bit more brain matter left than the mma/dmt guy. so i can’t help but wonder if this podcast is a bit more of a targeted effort at influencing new age people just coming across it like i did.
i was actually quite surprised at this, so i also did a bit of searching, and apart from the post you linked i also came across nothing else. but his work speaks for itself i guess.
Another big oof. Hippie ass white guy saying that we should just JAQ off and give other problematic white guys a chance. Sounds about white!
Also his book is co/ghost written by Neil Strauss, the game/PUA manual guy.
A surprising number of surviving former hippies have become viciously reactionary, because the world didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to. The old stereotypes don’t really apply anymore, and there was a lot of selfishness embedded in that culture anyway.
That’s a crazy lineup. I love how you can just say eggman/egghead on awful systems and I think everyone will know the person in question.
i’m gonna need a hint here, boss. Here’s my guesses:
my guesses
- Jim Carrey (eggman from live action sonic)
- DJT (campaigned on price of eggs)
- m12n (looks like an egg)
- that one LWer that posts really long anti-trans screeds (probably not this person but it’s tempting to label them as an egg)
any of these except the last one wouldn’t be an implausible guest of this podcast, honestly. (i was talking about andreessen)
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
“ChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law.”
Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.
Absolutely!
The thing about sov cits is that they use legalish words like a magical incantation. The words have no meaning to them, really. It’s a tarted-up glossolalia which reifies their wishes to manifest some outcome in court.
If a lawyer surrenders their craft to a bullshit engine, they’re doing the exact same thing: spouting law-shaped nonsense in the hope of getting the verdict they want, their only differentiator being that they showed up wearing a much nicer suit than the sov cit.
Just thinking about how I watched “Soylent Green” in high school and thought the idea of a future where technology just doesn’t work anymore was impossible. Then LLMs come and the first thing people want to do with them is to turn working code into garbage, and then the immediate next thing is to kill living knowledge by normalising people relying on LLMs for operational knowledge. Soon, the oceans will boil, agricultural industries will collapse and we’ll be forced to eat recycled human. How the fuck did they get it so right?
Doesnt help that there is a group of people who go ‘using the poor like
biofuelfood what a good idea’.E: Really influential movie btw. ;)
A real modest
brunch
I like that Soylent Green was set in the far off and implausible year of 2022, which coincidentally was the year of ChatGPT’s debut.
NASB: A question I asked myself in the shower: “Is there some kind of evolving, sourced document containing all the reasons why LLMs should be turned off?” Then I remembered wikis exist. Wikipedia doesn’t have a dedicated “criticisms of LLMs” page afaict, or even a “Criticisms” section on the LLM page. RationalWiki has a page on LLMs that is almost exclusively criticisms, which is great, but the tone is a few notches too casual and sneery for universal use.
@swlabr @BlueMonday1984 I’ve been thinking about this *a lot* recently, because the flood of information is so overwhelming. I’ve even been seriously considering making a bespoke “anti-big-tech” wiki as a way of organising this kind of information, with good sources for people to reference in their work places/institutions/letters to representatives. I have ADHD, though, so my chances of actually seeing this to completion are limited, and web dev was never my strong suit.
Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:
Is that supposed to be an advertisement in favor of AI? (As opposed to stealth satire?) Seeing it makes me want to get off my computer and touch grass.
I’m not sure, considering the massive reduction in social circle im more wondering the person who made this was outed as a sex pest. 2 Parents and one close friend sticking around till the proof, of the sex pestery being really irrefutable dropping, makes sense.
Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:
On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.
A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.
Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.
Tying this to a previous post of mine, I’m expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, “AI slop” output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.
Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.
does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one
New piece from Tante: On “Vibe Coding” - take a wild guess what its about.
My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?
At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”
Same script as the naive ‘leftwing’ case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.
Tired: Ned Ludd
Wired: Joe Butlerian
"Now it’s day and night and the generators belch
And like poor content moderators
We type and type, and when we die
Must fill dishonored uploads…"
Adam Conover’s put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation’s gonna make a full recovery.
EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:
Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything
Can Adam ruin something so much that he can’t ruin that particular ruination?
How though, either he got cold feet in the middle of selling out to the tech-fash or he was honestly that incredibly oblivious (see also: agreeing to do tim pool’s show), neither strikes me as especially mitigating.
edit: Tried to watch the video, I made it to the part where he all but claims he sold out ironically, apparently at the time he thought spreading the good news about Altman’s hilariously dystopic crypto pet project was so off-brand that it would be perceived like performance art or something, baffling.
He also kept going on about how the money wasn’t even that good as I guess further evidence that the whole thing was him going briefly insane, and not I don’t know just him allowing sponsors to test the waters before committing more heavily.
As if the only options available to get him to shill for something would be either heap Faustian amounts of cash on him or cast a confusion spell and hope he likes getting underpaid.
Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he’s got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how “everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier”.
Conover’s video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apologytm is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but “doing the bare minimum for an actual apology” is not one of them.
[4:00] … whose products [I] actively think are at best valueless and at worst harmful
Wow what a scathing critique of worldcoin! Calling it possibly harmless. Clearly even when making the apology he didn’t really get why we all hate it.
In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:
Dorian Knock-a-Moto
Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.
Firstly, an update on Grok’s White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grok’s prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.
Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:
You want my opinion on the “scab” comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.
Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))
If anything I think this is pretty solid evidence that they aren’t actually using it. There was enough of a gap that the nuke of that PR was an edit to the original post and I can’t imagine that if it had actually been used that we wouldn’t have seen another flurry of screenshots of bad output.
I think it also suggests that the engineers at x.ai are treating the whole thing with a level of contempt that I’m having a hard time interpreting. On one hand it’s true that the public GitHub using what is allegedly grok’s actual prompt (at least at time of publishing) is probably a joke in terms of actual transparency and accountability. On the other hand, it feels almost like either a cry for help or a stone-cold denial of how bad things are that the original change that prompted all this could have gone through in the first place.
Yeah indeed, had not even thought of the timegap. And it is such a bit of bullshit misdirection, very Muskian, to pretend that this fake transparency in any way solves the problem. We don’t know what the bad prompt was nor who did it, and as shown here, this fake transparency prevents nothing. Really wished more journalists/commentators were not just free pr.
New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentina’s election
He’s not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AI’s effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.
Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328
The main objection being along the lines of, “Milton Friedman’s “I am not a racist” tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt.”
Read it to the end and then re-read 2009’s The Gervais Principle. I hope Ed eventually comes back to Rao’s rant because they complement each other perfectly; Zitron’s Business Idiot is Rao’s Clueless! What Rao brings to the table is an understanding that Sociopaths exist and steer the Clueless, and also that the ratio of (visible) Clueless to Sociopaths is an indication of the overall health of an (individual) business; Zitron’s argument is then that we are currently in an environment (the “Rot Economy” in his writing) which is characterized by mostly Clueless business leaders.
Then re-read Doctorow’s 2022 rant Social Quitting, which introduced “enshittification”, an alternate understanding of Rao’s process. To Rao, a business pivots from Sociopath to Clueless leadership by mere dilution, but for Doctorow, there’s a directed market pressure which eliminates (or M&As) any businesses not willing to give up some Sociopathy in favor of the more generally-accepted Clueless principles. Concretely relevant to this audience, note how Sociopathic approaches to cryptocurrency-oriented banking have failed against Clueless GAAP accounting, not just at the regulatory level but at the level of handshakes between small-business CEOs.
Somebody could start a new flavor of Marxism here, one which (to quote an old toot of mine @[email protected] that I can’t find) starts by understanding that management is a failed paradigm of production and that quotes all of these various managers (Galloway, Rao, and Zitron were all management bros at one point, as were their heroes Scott Adams and Mike Judge) as having a modicum of insight cloaked in MBA-speak.
Sociopaths
Bit important to note here to people not familiar with the blog posts (now available as a book (in pdf form), because everything must be monetized) that sociopath is meant here as a specific type of person, not a clinical sociopath per se, but more a certain type of person inside the context of the blog post series. So people reacting to it beware.
is that Rao as in venkatesh?
(oh, you linked ribbonfarm, so I guess the answer is yes)
That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long 💀
TBF, Zitron has “wrap[ped] together everything I’ve written going back to [his] remote work coverage from 2021” with this piece - it was naturally gonna be long as hell.
Making an MCU comparison is deeply cliche at this point, but Zitron basically penned his personal equivalent to Avengers: Endgame with this - the impressive length is completely warranted.
He sure fucking did and it’s great.
These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.
No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn’t just dumb because governments aren’t businesses. It’s dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.
