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.)
In the current chapter of “I go looking on linkedin for sneer-bait and not jobs, oh hey literally the first thing I see is a pile of shit”
text in image
Can ChatGPT pick every 3rd letter in “umbrella”?
You’d expect “b” and “I”. Easy, right?
Nope. It will get it wrong.
Why? Because it doesn’t see letters the way we do.
We see:
u-m-b-r-e-l-l-a
ChatGPT sees something like:
“umb” | “rell” | “a”
These are tokens — chunks of text that aren’t always full words or letters.
So when you ask for “every 3rd letter,” it has to decode the prompt, map it to tokens, simulate how you might count, and then guess what you really meant.
Spoiler: if it’s not given a chance to decode tokens in individual letters as a separate step, it will stumble.
Why does this matter?
Because the better we understand how LLMs think, the better results we’ll get.
That’s a whole lot of words to say that it can’t spell.
Why does this matter?
Well, its a perfect demonstration that LLMs flat-out do not think like us. Even a goddamn five-year old could work this shit out with flying colours.
Yeah exactly. Loving the dude’s mental gymnastics to avoid the simplest answer and instead spin it into moralising about promptfondling more good
LLMs cannot fail, they can only be prompted incorrectly. (To be clear, as I know there will be people who think this is good, I mean this in a derogatory way)
Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he’s supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.
Personally, I’ve not been impressed with Ive’s design work in the past many years. Well, I’m sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how “unapologetically honest” the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I’m not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for “the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s”, and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.
I’m not sure Ive still knows how to design things that actually work as opposed to beautiful objects for Dubai yacht dwellers to look at and show off.
Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.
My money’s on OpenAI’s Gadgettm getting immediately compared to both of them as well, either by reviewers giving their (presumably negative) opinions on the product, or from people looking to dunk on OpenAI, if not AI as a whole.
The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?
On the one hand, OpenAI’s reality distortion field has managed to hold strong up until now, and its difficult to see the tech press recognising OpenAI’s Gadgettm to be just the Rabbit R1/Humane Pin with a fresh coat of paint.
On the other hand, the Rabbit R1 and Humane Pin are industry laughingstocks whose names are synonymous with “godawful AI product” in the public consciousness, and who basically killed the concept of such an AI Gadgettm in its crib - OpenAI could very well set themselves up to get relentlessly mocked for believing people wanted an AI Gadgettm at all.
Might as well start brainstorming dunks now… “Business model: Juicero for the Metaverse”.
Calling it a police cam for techbros seems like an obvious dunk. You can also make a gratuitous Simpsons reference and quip “Remember Humane? Its back, in OpenAI form!”
OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I’m linking to this because it’s exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en
I uh… I don’t think it’s going to change anyone’s minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:
EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)
Good luck with the move. Always sounded like a lot of trouble moving continents. And moving out of the USA seemed worse, dont they have some weird taxation system for people who moved away?
It’s the same taxation system, you have to pay US taxes still, but I think you can deduct taxes paid in the new country from what you owe the US.
Nah it’s not too bad the IRS guide is only 40 pages! somebody save me
- All US citizens get to file US taxes every year regardless of if they have any US sourced income
- Foreign income is also taxed (but see next two points)
- The first 126k of foreign income earned while living abroad is excluded from taxation (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion)
- Income that went to paying foreign taxes is also not taxed (Foreign Tax Credit)
- Banks hate opening accounts for US citizens since we’re subject to FATCA filing requirements and thus generate extra paperwork
- Also certain foreign mutual funds are taxed heavily (PFICs), requiring care in planning investments.
- There are a bunch of tax treaties with different countries, which may influence the exact details.
- If you do have deferred compensation that was granted in a state but that was vested or exercised while a non-resident of that state you may also have to file state taxes (e.g. FTB Publication 1004 for California)
I haven’t run through this in practice yet and I will probably give up and hire a professional.
I’m interested in jetting out as well. Did you get a job first? Or did you do something similar to Germany’s “Opportunity Visa”?
An internal transfer at my job actually. At least for now they need me so helped set that up, though I’m pretty worried on if that will last long enough for permanent residency or not.
I’d be a little nervous on a job seeker’s visa before knowing the language. It is really hard to find a job as a programmer in Europe without living there or being a citizen; because of language barriers, the labor market test, and the difficulty in getting a company to sponsor your visa. I didn’t send out that many job applications but so far my response rate is zero.
Probably if I couldn’t do a transfer I’d have ended up on an investment visa or study visa somewhere; though maybe I could have found a job in Japan since I can read intermediate Japanese.
I expect learning German to the B1 level will open up a lot of doors, so that’s my main goal for the next few years.
Anecdata: if you’re working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn’t
botheredgot around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.But it’s a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.
Oof im sorry, that sounds horrible. But hey welcome in the modern world, your other taxes will prob not be that much trouble.
Sounds like getting a professional to file it (at least the first time) will in the end cost less.
But congratulations on the move!
I think there’s also some kind of at-time exit tax if you ever decide to give up US citizenship, but I’m not good on the details
I’ve semi-seriously said elsewhere that the US treats its citizens as property (in the “as slaves” sense), and it’s fucked how close to true that is
glad to read you’re making some headway on getting the fuck out though!
Yeah I’ll probably have a big tax bill if I ever renounce citizenship. I haven’t thought about it too much yet since it’s still my only citizenship, and I have a lot of friends and family in the USA. Like a visitor visa might be fine in normal times, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it in an emergency today given how visitors are being treated lately.
'Till now I was always able to just do financial planning myself, but I really should hire a professional.
absolutely worth it given your coming plans. sucks because yet more expenditure but your happiness and safety are more important
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
that’s seriously amazing! I’m glad you were able to get things going relatively quickly.
I’m heckin’ moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.
Good luck!!
they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
The cringey “hello, fellow kids” vibe is really unbearable… good that people are not falling for that.
If Duolingo still had their userbase’s goodwill, it would’ve probably worked. They’ve been pulling that shit since their mascot Duo turned into a meme, and its worked out for them up until now.
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:
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.
Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything
Can Adam ruin something so much that he can’t ruin that particular ruination?
[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.
A reminder that AI slop tastes like boots.
Seems it was deleted. But due to reddit being reddit I noticed it pointed towards the ‘Swat Man: Volume 1 Kindle Edition’ amazon link. (Which I have not reproduced here)
E: ah nevermind aggressive adblockers deleted it on my end.
Not deleted. It’s just that the reddit programmers either DGAF or don’t know what they’re doing.
But yeah this one confused me. He appears to be a movie director / producer / writer and has a couple festival films under his belt. Nothing successful enough to get any buzz as far as I can tell.
Imagine working towards a Hollywood career for years and years only to write an AI-drawn comic book that, based on the title, misses the point of The Punisher. People he pitches his movie ideas to are going to assume he wrote the script with an LLM.
That gives me a ‘you broke reddit’ jackrobertsofficial is also empty for me (and empty if I use an incognito window, so I’m not blocked). I got the feeling that might be what was going on. Even if I had a hard time finding his old work, as the news articles he links on his own site were dead.
E: tried on my phone and it appears wtf, no wait. It is promoted, my addblockers just nuked it haha, my bad.
Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/
edit: Wrote it up
We’ve had one AI legal filing yes, but what about second AI legal filing?
https://bsky.app/profile/debgoldendc.bsky.social/post/3lpjr7i6lrs2n
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677.186.0.pdf
Instead, Defendant appears to have wholly invented case citations in his Motion for Leave, possibly through the use of generative artificial intelligence
Defendant bolstered this assertion with a lengthy string citation of legal authority and parentheticals that appeared to support Defendant’s proposition. But the entire string citation appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.
this makes me wonder how many spicy autocomplete fakes like that aren’t caught
a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol
Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:
You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent’s off the table right from the get-go.
If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA’s essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that’s their goal here.
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”
“people commit suicide after meeting me” is a weird thing to brag about
The reader mode in Firefox shows completely different version of the article, weird. I never understood how that feature works, is there some node that contains the site supplied version of text for that mode?
That’s the same article, it just skips title but leaves subtitle
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)
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
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.
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?).
My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.
In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.
This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.
In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn’t dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced
spywareprivacy violationtelemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.Now it’s the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.
That reminds me, remember there is an Xbox boycott going on for all the gamers out there. (Saw that after the boycot was started, both steam and humble pushed xbox game sales, the timing of which is very iffy).
It’s wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn
…and that’s why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
“Ultimately, I’m not sure that there’s anything computers can’t really teach you,”
How about common sense…
“it’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.”
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
If “it’s one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,” he said. “But the computer can.
No, it cannot. It’s a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Duolingo’s CFO made similar comments last year, saying, “AI helps us replicate what a good teacher does”
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, there’s more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Ugh. So terrible. Tech’s obsession with “scaling” is one of the worst things about tech.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course there’s the subtext of “but also we’ll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!”
Aaaarrgh. Tech’s obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed “see! people just had to get used to it!” (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools aren’t spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
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.
“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.”
Noted race science proponent and all-around slimeball Cremieux aka J Lasker reveals himself to be a union-hater
Love how all these EdGy DiSsIdEnT tHiNkErS eventually become indistinguishable from big-standard ‘cons
Wow cool numbers, love to put all unions in one big bag regardless of goals, ideology, trade and mode of action.
IWW intensifies
“You claim to like unions, but seem strangely hostile to police unions. Curious.”
- Turning Point USA
Net number of studies reporting positive or negative effects (excluding wages)
excluding wages! (and probably also benefits, retirement, a cap on working hours per day etc)
Is that whole thing in the comments about unions bad because monopolies bad and unions are just monopolies of labor the latest in bootlicking theory? Hadn’t really heard this take before.
ah yes, it’s that marxist notion, the monopoly of the proletariat
Studies find unions have negative impacts on things unions aren’t concerned with improving. What impact do they have on their actual goal i.e. protecting workers and improving their lot? We didn’t bother asking.
Something something UMWA.
Ben S voice “Look for the sake of the argument, what if we just assume im right, and ignore everything that shows I’m wrong. What then? Checkmate liberal!”
