Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
A woman was scheduled to give a talk at an AI conference. The organizers run her photo through an AI image expansion program to get the aspect-ratio right (how did we ever manage to show photos of speakers before AI existed?).
The AI image expansion invents a bra / undershirt which wasn’t visible in the original photo.
This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didn’t notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. It’s funny in a disgusting way.
I’d like to imagine that Adobe/other AI photo editing people are frantically scrambling to fondle their prompts a little harder to avoid things like this. Infinite whack-a-mole.
I wonder if Adobe has considered cooling their new data centers with liquid nitrogen?
Cold is key to successful turd polishing.
google got legally beat down a fair bit in app store area https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/court-orders-google-monopolist-knock-it-monopoly-stuff
I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it’s not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.
Of course he’s also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.
Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its ✨leadership principles✨, but this seems worse.
Didn’t corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
That fucking sucks, esp as you put a lot of time into it.
Ugh, from me as well: sorry to hear that.
I can relate to how you feel about the AI stuff. I also work for GenAI-pilled upper management, and the forced introduction of github copilot is coming soon. It will make us all super extra productive! …they say. Dreading it already. I won’t use it at all, I’ve already made that clear to my superior. But my colleagues might use it, and then I will have to review the AI slop… uggghh…
Maybe a small silver lining to raise the mood here, recent article from Monday: Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges
If even freaking Gartner is now saying “well, maybe AI is too expensive and not actually so useful”… then maybe the world of management will wisen up as well, soon, hopefully, maybe?
an idea I just had (which would need some work but talking hypothetical): wouldn’t it be lovely if
IDEsVS Code[0] automatically inserted “Copilot Used Here” start/end markers around all generated shit. could even make it a styleguide/editorconfig so it’s universally set across projects[1][0] - because lol ofc it’s mainly vscode rn [1] - and then when you find colleagues who lie about whether they’re using it you wrap all their desk shit in foil
I like the idea. Or maybe marking such changes in the commit message… I might try to bring that up when the time comes.
in the current most-typical mode of engagement, commit messages are too disconnected from the actual contents. it requires someone who gives a shit to go looking
conversely, what I mean is something like “a hook that guarantees that the moment the plugin is engaged and output from it is scribed in source, metadata about that event is simultaneously co-written”
it’s already generating a pile of other things, it may as well generate timestamps and callsig and callhash and shit too…
the number one problem with this, of course, is that it’s going to be extremely unpopular with a Vocal Set Of People who rely on this shit to make themselves look good
oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.
oof :x
what’s the next step on that?
I’m really sorry. I know how frustrating all of this bullshit is. Here for you. <3
Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilor, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.
PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I’m bricking it.
I know a bit about qgis + wfs (and surroundings)? enough to be dangerous tho
I don’t know what these acronyms mean 🫡
I’m just going to have to send an email in and be like hi I’m out of my depth. Can I still pass this class if I fail this assignment
Update: I got an extension 😇
I know it’s Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱
As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔
I mean yud is only really a guru on his own farts
classic warning case of someone getting high on their own supply
The big difference is that Yud is unrigorous while Wolfram is a plagiarist. Or maybe putting it another way, Yud can’t write proofs and Wolfram can’t write bibliographies.
I knew Wolfram was a massive asshole, but I didn’t know or forgot that Mathematica was based on appropriated publicly-owned work:
In the mid-1980s, Wolfram had a position at the University of Illinois-Urbana’s Beckman Institute for complex systems. While there, he and collaborators developed the program Mathematica, a system for doing mathematics, particularly algebraic transformations and finding exact-form solutions, similar to a number of other products (Maple, Matlab, Macsyma, etc.), which began to appear around the same time. Mathematica was good at finding exact solutions, and also pretty good at graphics. Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled).
and on that note, Symbolics did effectively the same thing with Macsyma (and a ton of other public software on top of that, all to drive sales of their proprietary Lisp machines), but a modernized direct descendent of the last publicly-owned version of Macsyma named Maxima is available and should run wherever Common Lisp does. it’s a pretty good replacement for a lot of what Mathematica does, and the underlying language is a lot less batshit too
It’s always the child prodigies
on a side note, I notice this passage in the review:
Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results. Now, the word “discovery” here is legitimate, but only in a special sense. When I took pre-calculus in high school, I came up with a method for solving systems of linear equations, independent of my textbook and my teacher: I discovered it. My teacher, more patient than I would be with adolescent arrogance, gently informed me that it was a standard technique, in any book on linear algebra, called “reduction to Jordan normal form”, after the man who discovered it in the 1800s. Wolfram discovered simple rules producing complexity in just the same way that I discovered Jordan normal form.
this is certainly mistaken. I think the author or teacher must have meant RREF or something to that effect, not Jordan normal form
Gauss–Jordan elimination, maybe?
yah there we go. gauss-jordan to reduce to rref
The fractal border between reality and bullshit, in a nutshell.
Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results.
I could go over Wolfram’s discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who’ve had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.
Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.
Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.
As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it’s F9 on firefox.
So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads
https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices
I don’t think it’s exclusively due to rust but it’s a very cool change
can only imagine how much wailing and consternation it must be causing in some areas
the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely aren’t ok, but that’s not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isn’t a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is
You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that it’s easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.
You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it’s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldn’t be use for new software development.
I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it’s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!
We are not the same.
Yeah that’s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it. There’s all sorts of rationalizations going on - it’s portable, it’s performant, it’s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.
Past a certain point it’s a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once you’re working with better tools.
If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it
I always suspected that I wasn’t a REAL MAN™, but I didn’t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like “well this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better way” was one of the first symptoms.
Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.
It’s also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here
and like all C things, the specificities of pointer mechanics might mean any one of of a number of things and they’re all correct
The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type “reactionary,” but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd
the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead
I don’t think it’s exclusively due to rust
to be fair, I don’t know any other languages concerned with safety other than rust, so it was my only option for joke construction.
the US DoD used to push for Ada adoption, with mixed success outside of where its use was mandated, due to Ada’s… well, look at it
cobol devs in shambles
Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]
Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists’ already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists’ goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.
On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin’s drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag’s dominance is inevitable. He’s not the first person I’ve seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he’s almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid’s fueling the tech industry’s relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.
I mean, he is their VP of Autoplag, so I imagine he’s got even more reason to believe than the average MBA. That doesn’t undermine your point, but I think the fact that adobe has appointed a VP of Autoplag should be part of the story to begin with, rather than being assumed. Did they ever have a VP of blockchain? Or a VP of copyright fraud?
the boot just does not understand why the face under it is complaining
not going to be successful in this new world without using it
The hubris is almost impressive in itself. There’s not a single technology in human history that has managed to kill every art form not using it. Digital art didn’t do it, photography, pencil, movable type printing, nib pens, oil paints, scraffito, probably not even the invention of currency did it. He thinks autoplag of all things will?
i suppose when this guy speaks of artists, he means people making art as their primary source of income. not to say that those people aren’t artists as valid as any others. but he’s saying if you don’t use ai to push out stuff ever faster, you won’t make it. fuck taking your time to get inspired and have it mean something, just give us the soulless garbage to sell our products already.
I somewhat assumed so based on the usual corporate ghoul definition of “successful”. That’s why I included currency as something without which artists have managed to make a living since its invention. That particular example may be arguable, but being a successful artist is not and will not be predicated entirely on how fast one can crank out “content”. How many movies do the wealthiest directors put out per year?
in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers
oh no, a bunch of nationalist pricks might stop fucking up our community spaces. I might never have a proud Russian gatekeep my contributions ever again! no please don’t go
and here’s hoping the American nationalist devs contributing on behalf of their military-industrial complex employer (hello Anduril) take a hint from this and also fuck off to their own communities where they can bully each other for no fucking reason
they won’t because the cruelty is the point for fascists regardless of nation, but here’s hoping
you see, they are Bad Guys, but they’re Our Bad Guys™ so they’re there to stay. russian devs were removed because of sanctions, not because of any moral reservations about nationalism
JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.
Oh wait, that’s just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o
mr president, we must not allow kernel gap
oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:
https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397
Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.
Quite the proof he no longer writes his own tweets. Fun fact seems like they created various freerossdayone cryptocurrency tokens, who are all doing badly (according to my quick google) he has lost the mandate of heaven.
Truly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.
Electric Wizard 🤝Donald Trump
“Legalize Drugs & Murder”
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said… this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
Olivia Squizzle followup: AI Replacement | Drawing Your Requests
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this, but its always nice to see someone actively piss all over AI in this manner.
beat me by seconds.
She’s incredible
introduced the mtg players to Ed zitron
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gdd083/magic_the_gathering_is_an_example_of_the_rot/
You did a damn good job spreading the Word of Ed.
Did something new happen in the scene, or just generally things getting shittier slowly?
much obliged
today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/
can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be
that article misses one of the delicious parts of that story: they called saltman a “podcast bro” in derision
looked up the previous thread (now that I’m at laptop briefly)
OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as “foundries” for chip manufacturing.
Oh man, that’s a delicious understatement. If the allegations are true, this was a plan that would make the military-industrial complex envious.
In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.
Wait we created a market and people are manipulating it in order to profit because it turns out market manipulation pays the same or more than being a
bankerinvestor“superpredictor” but is much easier?Shocking aye? And nobody saw this coming.
