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)

  • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

    Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop… blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs… noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these “AI” generators can’t leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don’t know for sure, and maybe I’m doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff…

    Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with “art things made by actual humans”, but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

    This sucks so much. I don’t want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know… How can trust be restored?

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

      It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      This sadly has caused my login problems to reappear on bsky. No idea what they are doing with their service, but I’m having regular issues with the site. Also seems ‘downforeveryoneorjustme’ enshittified. (the image is showing a part of the site which is now an advertisement for some AI bullshit chatbot/imagegenerator everything aislop roleplay thing). (seems to be fixed now, but wow did bsky have weird issues for me).

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      It really is incredible how bad twitter got to make me root for the company that thinks DID is good protocol design and that was started by Jack Dorsey.

      But heck it I’m (cautiously) rooting for Bluesky.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      the second is characteristically christian and associated with dignity culture.

      homeless people bear the imago dei. they are not intrinsic moral superiors but their plight is a shame to us because it denudes them of the dignity that should be theirs by right of their humanity.

      Lol yes, that’s exactly the way mainstream Christians view homelessness, their lack of Work Ethic :tm: is a “shame to us”. Lmao even.

      Christian charitable organisations are so well-known for their ethos of inherent human dignity.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      You know, I can’t tell if this is supposed to be “I know you’re saying that calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, but it’s more complicated than that” or “I know calling unhoused people vermin is some Nazi shit, and I’m honestly okay with that”.

      Gonna guess the latter given where it’s coming from and the fact that the actual “more complicated” is a salad of non sequiturs.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.

      It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don’t think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.

      Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don’t think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it’s often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.

      In both cases, the thing that people didn’t like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don’t like AI art, they don’t like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they’re still being pitched for.

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)

      given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Fun fact: The plain vanilla physics major at MIT requires three semesters of quantum mechanics. And that’s not including the quantum topics included in the statistical physics course, or the experiments in the lab course that also depend upon it.

        Grad school is another year or so of quantum on top of that, of course.

        (MIT OpenCourseWare actually has fairly extensive coverage of all three semesters: 8.04, 8.05 and 8.06. Zwiebach was among the best lecturers in the department back in my day, too.)

        • self@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          I almost want to go Twitter diving to see if kache has the requisite unhinged rant about how universities are only making quantum physics hard to get money/because of woke or whatever

          e: holy shit I already regret this

                • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                  0·
                  14 days ago

                  i stared into abyss again and he can’t grasp why flywheels for energy storage don’t work while trying to make happen a startup that sells hardware

                  “qm and fluid dynamics are easy” lol

              • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                0·
                14 days ago

                there’s more

                or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice

                yeah which might it be

                he’s also lying box understander

                (idk why these screenshots get stretched to entire width available sometimes and sometimes they don’t)

                there’s a lot of this

                we had these since manhattan project. sit tf down

                • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                  0·
                  13 days ago

                  or you could use something like qrencode that already is a thing and pipe it to image viewer of your choice

                  (my bad, I actually just looked at the images earlier, missed that you said that)

                • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
                  0·
                  14 days ago
                  • I don’t know Matt Mullenweg, but I’m afraid to ask
                  • I love the nonsensical misleading QR code onliner, conflictingly using both echo "<URL>" | and mac-only getoutput("pbpaste") (yuck).
                  • It is famously easy to maintain a job and mental well-being when you have no stable home and few sets of clothes! Famously you don’t need a registered address to open a bank account, and you don’t need a bank account to get a registered address!
                  • I guess you could run the GPU for 1000 years.
                  • One needs to learn that interpolation = confabulation = useless bullshit.
              • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
                0·
                15 days ago

                finding and looking up information you need effectively is a skill that is both very useful and i don’t think it’s taught explicitly, it’s a byproduct of being taught how to do research more generally. slapping a lying box in its place is not a substitute

                • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                  0·
                  14 days ago

                  but what if the lying box smiled at me and made me feel good about myself, surely that means it’s trustworthy right?

          • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            yeah don’t do it to yourself. I forget how I originally noticed this weirdo, it may have been through amolitor99’s continuous anthropology safari of TPOT freaks. Speaking of which, somebody needs to get that guy over here

            • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              15 days ago

              dammit now I’m going to have to look at twitter

              tpot fresh on my mind, too. just yesterday i was telling someone about how one of the people semi in that cluster had me going 🤨 and then had to explain a little about some of the highlights of tpot

          • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            15 days ago

            yeah, 3b1b animations can take you through all of undergrad math in probably a month if it all existed and you used anki

            We could bottle this arrogance and sell it as an emetic.

            And besides, we all know that mathematics videos peaked with the Angle Dance.

            • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              15 days ago

              as one of many people here who has undergone undergrad math, i reckon a month of youtube and anki might not be enough for even intro to linear algebra. I’m even saying this as someone who skipped all lectures and crammed before all the tests.

    • barsquid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn’t not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    v light, only weakly techtakes material, but I’m immature enough to want to share:

    spoiler

    I just got a sales email from “Richard at Autodesk” titled “Hear from the probing experts”

    Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      0·
      15 days ago

      Does anyone read these things before or after they’re sent?

      It sounds like spam - by my guess, they usually aren’t read at all.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Thanks to the power of Technology™ we can have an LLM generate spam, an automailer send it out to millions, where an automated spam filter can identify them and hide them in a separate inbox to be automatically deleted in a couple of days. Of course the technology isn’t perfect and sometimes someone sees one of these ads and, I assume, spends money on a product. But I have faith that these problems are solvable and we’ll be able to totally automate email spam to no longer interact with human beings at any point. Once that’s done we can apply the same methodologies to weekly internal memos, daily team meetings, and even unsolicited dick pics. Imagine never needing to take or see pictures of a stranger’s junk ever again while still massively scaling up the number of unsolicited dick pics in flight at any given time.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    New piece from The Atlantic: The AI Boom Has an Expiration Date

    The full piece is worth a read, but the conclusion’s pretty damn good, so I’m copy-pasting it here:

    All of this financial and technological speculation has, however, created something a bit more solid: self-imposed deadlines. In 2026, 2030, or a few thousand days, it will be time to check in with all the AI messiahs. Generative AI—boom or bubble—finally has an expiration date.

  • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Me, a nuclear engineer reading about “Google restarting six nuclear power plants”

    lol, lmao even

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        That’s just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:

        • The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
        • Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
        • Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle

        Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.

        Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*

        • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          In this context, “moat” is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo

        • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to “open” castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs

          that said it’s not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it’s not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv

        • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
          0·
          14 days ago

          they have the MediaWiki database dumps, which are XML so you can do anything with them!! *

          * the actual page text is a single field

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    here’s the latest on the wordpress situation thanks to 404media:

    New alignment offer: I guess some people were sad they missed the last window. Some have been leaking to the press and ex-employees. That’s water under the bridge. Maybe the last offer needed to be higher. People have said they want a new window, so this is my attempt. Here’s a new one: You have until 00:00 UTC Oct 17 (-4 hours) to DM me the words, ‘I resign and would like to take the 9-month buy-out offer’ You don’t have to say any reason, or anything else. I will reply ‘Thank you.’ Automattic will accept your resignation, you can keep you [sic] office stuff and work laptop; you will lose access to Automattic and Wong (no slack, user accounts, etc). HR will be in touch to wrap up details in the coming days, including your 9 months of compensation, they have a lot on their plates right now. You have my word this deal will be honored. We will try to keep this quiet, so it won’t be used against us, but I still wanted to give Automatticians another window.

    there’s a (mid) joke here about how a boy who’s obsessed with photography really should understand more about optics

    and who wouldn’t trust their livelihood in a difficult job market to a promise from a very stable genius like matt, who will destroy you financially if he thinks you talked to the press:

    After an exodus of employees at Automattic who disagreed with CEO Matt Mullenweg’s recently divisive legal battle with WP Engine, he’s upped the ante with another buyout offer—and a threat that employees speaking to the press should “exit gracefully, or be fired tomorrow with no severance.”

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    Molly White reports on Kamala Harris’s recent remarks about Cryptocurrency being a cool opportunity for black men.

    VP Harris’s press release (someone remind me to archive this once internet archive is up). Most of the rest of it is reasonable, but it paints cryptocurrency in a cautiously positive light.

    Supporting a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and other digital assets so Black men who invest in and own these assets are protected

    […]

    Enabling Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation.

    More than 20% of Black Americans own or have owned cryptocurrency assets. Vice President Harris appreciates the ways in which new technologies can broaden access to banking and financial services. She will make sure owners of and investors in digital assets benefit from a regulatory framework so that Black men and others who participate in this market are protected.

    Overall there has been a lot of cryptocurrency money in this US election on both sides of the aisle, which Molly White has also reported extensively on. I kind of hate it.

    “regulation” here is left (deliberately) vague. Regulation should start with calling out all the scammers, shutting down cryptocurrency ATMs, prohibiting noise pollution, and going from there; but we clearly don’t live in a sensible world.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.