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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

    See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

    I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

    • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.

      • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

      Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

      I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

      This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

    and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

    nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

    oh, what’s that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Cloudflare is such a weird company in various ways. Saying loudly that they can’t judge groups when people ask them not to support the neo-nazis, harassers and worse (they have moved on this under pressure, but it takes a lot of pressure). But then they do this.

      • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I guess I should be clear this is not an endorsement of cloudflare, just fun to see dickheads being dickheads to each other

      • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Wasn’t the first time he shut down 8chan (or was it Kiwifarms? Something along the lines), he immediately came out to say “It’s really bad that I have the power to take down a website of shitheads.” Just seemed like everything about his ideology is confused.

        • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Nobody told him to make his CDN so dominant in the market. He kinda chose to have this power. If you think Cloudflare’s services are some kind of a universal inalienable right, make them free, you pussy. Be a philantropist, share that sweet bandwidth with the poor. Gimme a /24, coward. Why are you taking money for a basic necessity, you monster?

          Y’all can thank me for taking down 8ch and KF, because I also do not run hosting infrastructure for either of them. Same goes to all of you who do not run a CDN that welcomes nazi websites. Thank you for your service.

        • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          There’s nothing confused about his ideology. Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought, but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence in Ireland (which was the final act of kiwi farms, from recollection. Presumably even the ceo couldn’t defend them at that point, though I bet he tried).

          Dude doesn’t give a shit about free speech, or lament the power he’s ended up with. He just really loves fascism.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Anything to do with porn or sex work will get kicked to the curb without a second thought

            can’t say why but I can say this is not completely/100% true; however

            but fascists and bigots will be defended up to the point where they try to restart sectarian violence

            yup

            please don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to bat for cloudflare. the company is detestable and problematic in extremely many dimensions

            in this particular case and wrt the dude himself, it indeed appears to be much about the power. in the case of the commentary FredFig references, I suspect that came through a lens of “it is bad that I can do this [where “this” is “acquiesce to societal pressure to silence people I don’t wish to silence”]”. didn’t see the comment at the time though, so I have no idea if it was dogwhistled or what at the time

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I got this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY in my inbox, because once your email appears on a single published paper you’re forever doomed to garbage like this (transcript at the end):

    Highlights:

    • Addresses me as Dr. I’m not a doctor. I checked, and apparently Dr. Muhhamad Imran Qureshi indeed has a PhD and is a lecturer at Teesside University International Business School (link to profile). His recent papers include a bunch of blockchain bullshit. Tesside University appears to be a legit UK university, although I’m not sure how legit the Business School is (or how legit any Business School can be, really).
    • Tells us their research is so shit that using wisdom woodchippers actually increases their accuracy.
    • One of the features is “publication support”, so this might be one of those scams where you pay an exorbitant fee to get “published” in some sketchy non-peer-reviewed journal.
    • One of the covered AI tools is Microsoft Excel. If you were wondering if “AI” had any meaning.
    • Also, by god, are there so many different ChatGPT clones now? I haven’t heard most of those names. I kinda hope they’re as AI as Excel is.

    I’m not sure which would be worse, this being a scam, or them legit thinking this brings value to the world and believing they’re helping anyone.

    transcript

    Email titled Revolutionize Your Research: AI-Powered Systematic Literature Review Master Class

    Online course on writing AI-Powered Systematic Literature Review

    Register Now:

    Dear Dr. [REDACTED],

    we’re reaching out because we believe our AI-Powered Systematic Review Masterclass could be a game-changer for your research. As someone who’s passionate about research writing, we know the challenges of conducting thorough and efficient systematic reviews.

    Key takeaways:

    • AI-powered prompt engineering for targeted literature searches
    • Crafting optimal research questions for AI analysis Intelligent data curation to streamline your workflow
    • Leveraging AI for literature synthesis and theory development

    Join our Batch 4 and discover how AI can help you:

    • Save time by automating repetitive tasks
    • Improve accuracy with AI-driven analysis
    • Gain a competitive edge with innovative research methods

    Enrollment is now open! Don’t miss this opportunity to take your systematic review skills to the next level.

    Key Course Details: Course Title: AI-Powered Systematic Literature Reviews Master Class Live interaction + recording = Learning that fits your life Dates: October 13, 2024, to November 3, 2024 Live Session Schedule: Every Sunday at 2 PM UK time (session recordings will be accessible). Duration: Four Weeks Platform: Zoom Course Fee: GBP 100 Certification: Yes Trainer: Dr. Muhammad Imran Qureshi

    Key features

    • Asynchronous learning
    • Video tutorials
    • Live sessions with access to recordings
    • Research paper Templates
    • Premade Prompts for Systematic Literature Review
    • Exercise Files
    • Publication support

    The teaching methodology will offer a dynamic learning experience, featuring live sessions every Saturday via Zoom for a duration of four weeks. These sessions will provide an interactive platform for engaging discussions, personalised feedback, and the opportunity to connect with both the course instructor and fellow participants. Moreover, our diverse instructional approach encompasses video tutorials, interactive engagements, and comprehensive feedback loops, ensuring a well-rounded and immersive learning experience.

    Certification

    Upon successful completion of the course, participants will receive certification from the Association of Professional Researchers and Academicians UK, validating their mastery of AI-enabled methodologies for conducting comprehensive and insightful literature reviews.

    AI tools included

    • Microsoft Excel
    • ChatGPT
    • Elicit
    • Powerdrill
    • Sciespace
    • Jenni
    • Gemni
    • Copilot
    • SCOPUS
    • Scholarcy and many more Register Now
    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Aren’t you supposed to try to hide your psychopathic instincts? I wonder if he’s knowingly bullshitting or if he’s truly gotten high on his own supply.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      You know, when Samuel L Jackson decided that the best approach to climate change was to kill billions of poor people rather than ask the rich to give up any privileges in Kingsman it was more blatantly evil but appreciably less dumb than this. Very similar wavelength though.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I didn’t realize I was still signed up to emails from NanoWrimo (I tried to do the challenge a few years ago) and received this “we’re sorry” email from them today. O can’t really bring myself to read and sneer at the whole thing, but I’m pasting the full text below because I’m not sure if this is public anywhere else.

    spoiler

    Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of this organization. One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size.

    National Novel Writing Month To Our NaNoWriMo Community:

    There is no way to begin this letter other than to apologize for the harm and confusion we caused last month with our comments about Artificial Intelligence (AI). We failed to contextualize our reasons for making this statement, we chose poor wording to explain some of our thinking, and we failed to acknowledge the harm done to some writers by bad actors in the generative AI space. Our goal at the time was not to broadcast a comprehensive statement that reflected our full sentiments about AI, and we didn’t anticipate that our post would be treated as such. Earlier posts about AI in our FAQs from more than a year ago spoke similarly to our neutrality and garnered little attention.

    We don’t want to use this space to repeat the content of the full apology we posted in the wake of our original statements. But we do want to raise why this position is critical to the spirit—and to the future—of NaNoWriMo.

    Supporting and uplifting writers is at the heart of what we do. Our stated mission is “to provide the structure, community, and encouragement to help people use their voices, achieve creative goals, and build new worlds—on and off the page”. Our comments last month were prompted by intense harassment and bullying we were seeing on our social media channels, which specifically involved AI. When our spaces become overwhelmed with issues that don’t relate to our core offering, and that are venomous in tone, our ability to cheer on writers is seriously derailed.

    One priority this year has been a return to our mission, and deep thinking about what is in-scope for an organization of our size. A year ago, we were attempting to do too much, and we were doing some of it poorly. Though we admire the many writers’ advocacy groups that function as guilds and that take on industry issues, that isn’t part of our mission. Reshaping our core programs in ways that are safe for all community members, that are operationally sound, that are legally compliant, and that are mission-aligned, is our focus.

    So, what have we done this year to draw boundaries around our scope, promote community safety, and return to our core purpose?

    We ended our practice of hosting unrestricted, all-ages spaces on NaNoWriMo.org and made major website changes. Such safety measures to protect young Wrimos were long overdue.

    We stopped the practice of allowing anyone to self-identify as an educator on our YWP website and contracted an outside vendor to certify educators. We placed controls on social features for young writers and we’re on the brink of relaunch.

    We redesigned our volunteer program and brought it into legal compliance. Previously, none of our ~800 global volunteers had undergone identity verification, background checks, or training that meets nonprofit standards and that complies with California law. We are gradually reinstating volunteers.

    We admitted there are spaces that we can’t moderate. We ended our policy of endorsing Discord servers and local Facebook groups that our staff had no purview over. We paused the NaNoWriMo forums pending serious overhaul. We redesigned our training to better-prepare returning moderators to support our community standards.

    We revised our Codes of Conduct to clarify our guidelines and to improve our culture. This was in direct response to a November 2023 board investigation of moderation complaints.

    We proactively made staffing changes. We took seriously last year’s allegations of child endangerment and other complaints and inspected the conditions that allowed such breaches to occur. No employee who played a role in the staff misconduct the Board investigated remains with the organization.

    Beyond this, we’re planning more broadly for NaNoWriMo’s future. Since 2022, the Board has been in conversation about our 25th Anniversary (which we kick off this year) and what that should mean. The joy, magic, and community that NaNoWriMo has created over the years is nothing short of miraculous. And yet, we are not delivering the website experience and tools that most writers need and expect; we’ve had much work to do around safety and compliance; and the organization has operated at a budget deficit for four of the past six years.

    What we want you to know is that we’re fighting hard for the organization, and that providing a safer environment, with a better user interface, that delivers on our mission and lives up to our values is our goal. We also want you to know that we are a small, imperfect team that is doing our best to communicate well and proactively. Since last November, we’ve issued twelve official communications and created 40+ FAQs. A visit to that page will underscore that we don’t harvest your data, that no member of our Board of Directors said we did, and that there are plenty of ways to participate, even if your region is still without an ML.

    With all that said, we’re one month away! Thousands of Wrimos have already officially registered and you can, too! Our team is heads-down, updating resources for this year’s challenge and getting a lot of exciting programming staged and ready. If you’re writing this season, we’re here for you and are dedicated, as ever, to helping you meet your creative goals!

    In community,

    The NaNoWriMo Team

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      God that’s exhausting. Wasn’t Nanowrimo supposed to be a fun thing at some point? Is there anyone in the world who thinks this sort of scummy PR language is attractive?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I don’t have the broader context to comment on the changes they discussed regarding child endangerment and community standards apart from “Wait… oh my God you weren’t already doing that???”

      But it’s such a huge pull back to go from “hating AI is ableist and basically Hilter” to “uhhhh guys we’ve had our plates full cleaning up the mess and the most we’ll say about AI is to stop being assholes about it on our forums.” Clearly there’s still a lot of cleaning up to do at some level.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    nasb, fedi is for losers

    been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc

    one of the things I’ve been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don’t think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I’ve said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them

    but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven’t really been able to estimate

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        musk… chess… post… ?

        actually, forget I asked. I’ve had an eventful enough week of bullshit, and am going to close my friday off with some careless daydrinking and relaxation

        (e: I would add: good god “musk chess post” must be one of the craziest strings of words I’ve seen in a while)

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      My computer crashed as I was writing a response. In short:

      I think fedi existing and having the userbase it has is “victory” enough. Capitalism and fascism push us to think “winning” and “success” are the greatest thing to aspire to. To “win” over capitalism and fascism will require an unlearning and disavowal of those aspirations.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        This is absolutely an important idea, but in the context of anti-capitalism I think there’s a kind of catch-22 at play. The alternative systems that operate under a capitalist paradigm have serious externalities that come back to bite us whether we engage or not with them. My wife and I have spent some late nights over the last week trying to help family and friends in North Carolina keep track of which roads are usable, who is or isn’t confirmed to be alive yet, etc. Maybe I’m a little extra feisty about climate change today, but it seems like while the alternative doesn’t have to “win” in the same way that capitalists want to we do still need them to lose. Existing independently in parallel isn’t a sustainable end goal, though I do agree that parallel structures are an important part of the solution.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        oh yeah, I agree quite strongly with that sentiment too (and that’s why I didn’t re-use the words of the post I linked)

        the fedi has some pretty dire threats (shit like threads etc) that I do think it needs to deal with by way of more teeth (consider it self-protective boundary setting), but in general I think a lot of the current state of it satisfying people just for being happy to be themselves is perfectly fine and good

        side note: part of my problem is that my thinking on matters is a bit waterlogged due to shortage of knowledge/references, and backfilling that is … well, hard to find the right resources for reading, and perpetual spoon shortage. I’ve been working my way through some Graeber and some other stuff, but very slowly and need more things. also doesn’t help that ZA is, functionally, a desert island

        • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Side note:…

          Man I feel this. A constant, nagging feeling of “I should read theory,” but man, I hate reading theory.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      You know that famous Keynes quote, right. To paraphrase: “the tech sector can remain irrational for longer than the planet can remain habitable”.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It is worth mentioning that this is the question that catalysed the SRD post:

      Most Effective Aid to Gaza?

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’m not in support of Effective Altruism as an organization, I just understand what it’s like to get caught up in fear and worry over if what you’re doing and donating is actually helping. I donate to a variety of causes whenever I have the extra money, and sometimes it can be really difficult to assess which cause needs your money more. Due to this, I absolutely understand how innocent people get caught up in EA in a desire to do the maximum amount of good for the world. However, EA as an organization is incredibly shady. u/Evinceo provided this great article: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/effective-altruism-is-a-welter-of-fraud-lies-exploitation-and-eugenic-fantasies/

      Man, that hits close to home. It’s a hard sell to sneer at people ostensibly doing their best to do good. Any kind of altruism, particularly one ostensibly focused on at least trying to be effective, feels like a such a rare treat that I feel like the worst kind of buzzkill letting newcomers know what cynical doomer ass death obsessed sex cult (and not even in a kinkily cool way*) a big chunk of EA and other TESCRL are. I can relate to them in so many ways, especially remembering what my teenage self was like, but at the same time it’s weirdly hard to articulate how immature those opinions (some of which) I used to, and they continue to hold, are**.

      Anyway, charity is a symptom of the failure of society. Luxury is a human right. Profit is exploitation. Nobody gets a billion dollars without mass homicide.

      • but unfortunately often in an uncool, very rapey way ** not all of them, there are levels of cringe I managed to avoid even in my teenage years
    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla

    “if you can’t beat 'em, join 'em” but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

    And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet

    this tracks analogously to something I’ve been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of “the internet”, in the stead of “all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else”

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

      If the stars come right soon, there may not be a Google to beg for money

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Thanks I hate it.

      [Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

      Content is a scarce resource y’know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm’s two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

      We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

      WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      i … have no idea whatsoever what the use case is here … you make the chatbot generate the code instead of cloning the repo? or it’s like generating an API that doesn’t work or something?

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Think it is an attempt to make it easier to feed somebodies work into a LLM. So you know, stealing.

        • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          Yeah it just collates everything in the repo into a single text file so you can upload that to the shit machine

          • self@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            fucking… that’s all? some shit you can do moments after learning about the GitHub API for the first time? and I shouldn’t be surprised, but this is the code that people were fellating in the Twitter comments and/or using to advertise their own shitware?

            Been waiting for this since i opened my github account. 🙏🏼

            fucker, how are you like this?

            • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Ok I found a similar tool in the tweets replies and here’s what it suggests prompting the chatbot with

              This file contains my entire codebase. Please review the overall structure and suggest any improvements or refactoring opportunities, focusing on maintainability and scalability.

              Based on the codebase in this file, please generate a detailed README.md that includes an overview of the project, its main features, setup instructions, and usage examples.

              Analyze the code in this file and suggest a comprehensive set of unit tests for the main functions and classes. Include edge cases and potential error scenarios.

              Review the codebase for adherence to coding best practices and industry standards. Identify areas where the code could be improved in terms of readability, maintainability, and efficiency. Suggest specific changes to align the code with best practices.

              This file contains the entire codebase of library. Please provide a comprehensive overview of the library, including its main purpose, key features, and overall architecture.

              These people use chatbots daily yet still seem to be under the impression that LLMs are competent. I don’t even know what to say.

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    So, today MS publishes this blog post about something with AI. It starts with “We’re living through a technological paradigm shift.”… and right there I didn’t bother reading the rest of it because I don’t want to expose my brain to it further.

    But what I found funny is that also today, there’s this news: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24259369/microsoft-hololens-2-discontinuation-support

    So Hololens is discontinued… you know… AR… the last supposedly big paradigm shift that was supposedly going to change everything.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

      It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

      Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

      With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

      (Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

      It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

      Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).

      I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

      Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        re: how can a chatbot help with life?

        This just their brains on science fiction, they think chatbot can help like the independent AI agents could in the science fiction they half remember. Or at least they think marketing it like that will appeal to people.

        A lot less, ‘Copilot make this list of bullet points into an email’ and more ‘Copilot, lock on the the intruder, close the bulkheads after them and flush it to the nearest trash compactor’.

        I think that ‘giving microsoft the power to do things in my behalf’ is quite an iffy decision to make, but that is just me. Ow look it autorenwed your licenses for you, and bought a subscription Copaint, it even got you a deal not 240 dollars per year, but 120, a steal!

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

          From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

          • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            this is why i keep hammering on how, functionally, OpenAI is a branch of MS and they’re only separate so OpenAI’s reputation doesn’t stain MS.

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            Despite the industry’s deeply ingrained neophilia, I think it speaks to the importance of backwards compatibility and legacy systems.

            I can’t help but think that the genAI craze will end up being a regrettable side-quest along the path to “coding for non-programmers” akin to Visual Basic. But hey, I bet there’s a lot more legacy VB apps being kept alive out there than anyone would be comfortable with.

            • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source

                sorta, but it’s a veneer in furtherance of other goals (telemetry, market dominance, and control)

                one of the things I do with my computers is run LittleSnitch in always-prompt mode (LS is an app-level firewalling solution on macos), and hooo boy do I hate it when I end up having to open/touch vscode for some reason. the last time I did, I spent most of the first 5 minutes being prompted for (undeclared!) connections vscode attempted to make in the name of telemetry. similar experience with vscodium interacting with packages, and a bunch of their toolchains

              • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                And now they’re actually Open Source!

                Eh, kind of but also not. VS Code is proprietary, but you have the vscode:vscodium::chrome:chromium thing. Unlike in Chromium’s case, the proprietary version actually comes with some amenities one might actually care about (mainly in the plugin repository).

                You could say Open Source got some big wins in 2010s, leading to MSFT doing their fair share of contributions to Free software and openwashing as much of the rest as they can manage, but let’s not kid ourselves. They wouldn’t need to openwash if most of their stuff weren’t still proprietary. Last I checked MSVC, SQL Server, Azure, Copilot, IIS, Power BI, and the DirectX SDKs were all totally closed and jealously guarded.

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I think it’s also a case of thinking about form before function. It’s not quite as bad a case as the metaverse nonsense was, but there’s still a lack of curiosity about the sci-fi they read. In most stories that treat AI as anything less than a god, the replacement of people with artificial tools is about either what gets lost (the I, Robot movie, Wall-E) or the fact that effectively replacing people requires creating something with the same moral worth (Blade Runner, I, Robot, the Aasimov collection, etc).

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        perhaps… one of the most

        Load bearing words!

        life’s complexities

        I don’t think there’s an interpretation of this phrase in which AI actually helps.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

        call me when I can actually tange them