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. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)
“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”
That’s it. That’s the take.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/46xKegrH8LRYe68dF/vire-s-shortform?commentId=PGSqWbgPccQ2hog9a
Their responses in the comments are wild too.
I’m tending towards a troll. No-one can be that dumb. OTH it is LessWrong.
I listen solely to 12-hour-long binaural beats tracks from YouTube, to maximize my focus for
promptcontext engineering. Get with the times or get left behindDude came up with an entire “obviously true” “proof” that music has no value, and then when asked how he defines “value” he shrugs his shoulders and is like 🤷♂️ money I guess?
This almost has too much brainrot to be 100% trolling.
“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”
(Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)
However speaking as someone with success on informatics olympiads
The rare nerd who can shove themselves into a locker in O(log n) time
I once saw the stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, and the scientist who conditioned Alexander against sex and violence said almost the same thing when they discovered that he’d also conditioned him against music.
Today in linkedin hell:
Xbox Producer Recommends Laid Off Workers Should Use AI To ‘Help Reduce The Emotional And Cognitive Load That Comes With Job Loss’
https://aftermath.site/xbox-microsoft-layoffs-ai-prompt-chatgpt-matt
Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.
Today in “I wish I didn’t know who these people are”, guess who is a source for the New York Times now.
Ye it was a real “oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good” moment
If anybody doesn’t click, Cremieux and the NYT are trying to jump start a birther type conspiracy for Zohran Mamdani. NYT respects Crem’s privacy and doesn’t mention he’s a raging eugenicist trying to smear a poc candidate. He’s just an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.
Ed Zitron’s planning a follow-up to “The Subprime AI Crisis”:
(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)
EDIT: Swapped the image for one that’s easier-to-read
Managers: “AI will make employees more productive!”
WaPo: “AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings” https://archive.ph/ejC53
Managers: “not like that!!!”
This meeting could have been a text document of plausible sounding jibberish nobody needs to read.
LWronger posts article entitled
“Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly”
OK, title case, obviously serious.
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.
Nope he’s going for satire.
And ladies, he’s available!
I eas slightly saddened to scroll over his dating profile and see almost every seemed to be related to AI even his other activities. Also not sure how well a reference to a chad meme will make you do in the current dating in SV.
Bruh, there’s a part where he laments that he had a hard time getting into meditation because he was paranoid that it was a form of wire heading. Beyond parody. The whole profile is 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩
Maybe it’s to hammer home the idea that time before DOOM is limited and you might as well get your rocks off with him before that happens.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0025.html
found this while stalking @self@awful.systems’s mastodon, the people working on ActivityPub want to shoehorn Ai into it somehow.
including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI’s,
“You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ prepended? Scary!”
through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.
Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.
Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you skim places like HN or more chillingly the mainstream tech news outlets, I’ve not seen the term Agent used to mean anything but AI agents in many months. The usage has shifted to AI being the implied default, and otherwise having to be specified.
New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry
Very practical no notes
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:
Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage
That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”
Whatever
EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the “table saw” quote from - added it accordingly.
This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around “AI” as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it’s just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we’re several AI “cycles” deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being “retro”) some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.
This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we’re seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.
HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.
The extreme hypercentralisation really does suck :|
Also HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.
now now, it’s not HP it’s
ProliantHPEHPE Aruba…coming soon:
HPE Aruniper?
Stop killing games has hit the orange site. Of course, someone is very distressed by the fact that democratic processes exist.
This is golden: https://soundcloud.com/ericwbailey/rfc-2119
Comic Book Guy energy
God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.
New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:
You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.
For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:
-
On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.
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On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.
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On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.
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As bad as things are on the Nazi Bar called
TwitterX, you can still find some real gems
