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.)

  • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    2 hours ago

    This is a thought I’ve been entertaining for some time, but this week’s discussion about Ars Technica’s article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.

    A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven’t cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won’t dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It’s gassed. The idea that “it might be ME up there one day!” persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don’t have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.

    For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I’ve seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems… which, if it’s not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.

    Everybody’s looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      8 hours ago

      just mark C for every answer if you don’t get it, that’s what the State of California taught me in elementary school

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Refusal of statins was one of the most prominent anti-medical trends I remember observing among right-wing acquaintences, even well before such people got on the anti-vax bandwagon. To be sure, some people experience bad side-effects (including my mom, at least for a while), but it definitely seemed like a few bits of anecdata in the early 2010s built into a broad narrative of “doctor’s tryin’ ta kill ya”

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        I love how srid deflects by claiming no one has reported bad outcomes from the “meat and butter” diet… I found an endless stream of anecdotes from Google, like this.

        can you imagine sneak, of all people, telling you you’re crazy and probably being right?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      1 day ago

      My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you’ll see references to “not wanting to start the vitamin C debate” in forums.

      I’m pretty sure it’s not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      Here’s a bonus high fiber diet pro-tip: Metamucil tastes like old socks and individual capsules have hardly any fiber anyway, I eat triscuits and Oroweat Double-Fiber bread instead because they’re both much much better tasting. Also chili is the food of the gods.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      Does anyone know who or what is Ziz in this context? Google says jewish mythological beast.

      edit: found this:

      The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.

      They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasek’s suicide.

      They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.

      This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      1 day ago

      What the fuck?

      The agents were conducting a routine roving patrol when they stopped Bauckholt and a female in the town close to the border. During a records check, the unidentified female occupant was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows.

      After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.

      … What the fuck?

      • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        21 hours ago

        The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls can’t be acausally blackmailed.

        • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          21 hours ago

          Ziz is a boogeyman figure to them at this point. I think its deliberate to deflect from the sex abuse stuff (ziz was a part of that whole controversy).

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        1 day ago

        Jesus wept, it’s so frustratingly obvious that anytime some flavor of cop kills someone, the news media reporting (if any) will be this weird Yoda grammar pidgin.

        The femoidically gendered female shot with its gun by very personally pulling the trigger, with this viscerally physical action performed by the said femalian in most pointedly concrete terms amounting to it (the femaloidistical entity, a specimen of the species known as females) firing lethal gunshots at the border patrol with the female’s own two hands.

        Subsequently return fire manifested itself from somewhere and came into contact with the female suspect female. The Justice Enforcement Officers involved in the situation were made a part of a bilateral exchange of gunfire between the shooting female and the officers situated in the scenario in which shooting was, to some extent, quite possibly performed from their side as well.

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It’s a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called “LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL”

    I didn’t have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy

    We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.

    (Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)

    Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.

    I’d also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate “DATABASES AND ML” session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/

    you’d think it’s a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is

    for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more “impressive” c-suite fooling machine

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      21 hours ago

      The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my “ORACLE = NAZIS” tshirt

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Let them fight.gif

      Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. […] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.

      One word: Foxconn

      I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.

      Ed Zitron:

      [mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn’t that meant to be a Microsoft project?

      Hey wasn’t that project contingent on “meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI’s AI”?

      (Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Karl Bode comments:

        I like how none of the reporting I’ve seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbank’s multi-year, very obvious history of failures

        I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly “hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!”

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Sidenote: AFAIK, even with this pardon, Ulbricht still ended up spending more time in prison than if he took a plea deal he was reportedly offered:

        He was offered a plea deal, which would have likely given him a decade-long sentence, with the ability to get out early on good behavior. Worst-case scenario, he would have spent five years in a medium-security prison and been freed.

        Gotta say, this whole situation’s reminding me of SBF - both of them thought they could outsmart the Feds, and both received much harsher sentences than rich white collar criminals usually get as a result.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          2 days ago

          Not really sure if he thought he was smart or got bad legal advice from coiners who figured he could get off scot-free because “crypto” and “harm reduction”

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            1 day ago

            Probably both tbh. It really is like SBF round 1, but because it’s drugs instead of financial crimes they didn’t need to hire Margot Robbie to explain why it’s illegal and destructive to everyone from her bath.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      Ah yes that will be good for international relations and the morale of law enforcement and anti cybercrime people. Lol it is all so stupid.

      This and the releasing of the jan 6 people who assaulted cops (one cop who testified against them got a shitton of messages they got early release) is going to do wonders. Not that it will shake the belief of a lot of people that the repubs are the party of back the blue and law and order.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    following on from this comment, it is possible to get it turned off for a Workspace Suite Account

    1. contact support (? button from admin view)
    2. ask the first person to connect you to Workspace Support (otherwise you’ll get some made-up bullshit from a person trying to buy time or Case Success or whatever, simply because they don’t have the privileges to do what you’re asking)
    3. tell the referred-to person that you want to enable controls for “Gemini for Google Workspace” (optionally adding that you have already disabled “Gemini App”)

    hopefully you spend less time on this than the 40-something minutes I had to (a lot of which was spent watching some poor support bastard start-stop typing for minutes at a time because they didn’t know how to respond to my request)

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    2 days ago

    so the new feature in the next macos release 15.3 is “fuck you, apple intelligence is on by default now”

    For users new or upgrading to macOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during Mac onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.

    https://archive.ph/4pSIw

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

    til that there’s not one millionaire with family business in south african mining in current american oligarchy, but at least two. (thiel’s father was an exec at mine in what is today Namibia). (they mined uranium). (it went towards RSA nuclear program). (that’s easily most ghoulish thing i’ve learned today, but i’m up only for 2h)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      there’s probably a fair couple more. tracing anything de beers or a good couple of other industries will probably indicate a couple more

      (my hypothesis is: the kinds of people that flourished under apartheid, the effect that had on local-developed industry, and then the “wider world” of opportunities prey they got to sink their teeth into after apartheid went away; doubly so because staying ZA-only is extremely limiting for ghouls of their sort - it’s a fixed-size pool, and the still-standing apartheid-vintage capital controls are Limiting for the kinds of bullshit they want to pull)

  • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    Banner start to the next US presidency, with Wiener Von Wrong tossing a Nazi salute and the ADL papering that one over as an “awkward gesture”. 2025 is going to be great for my country.

    Incidentally is “Wiener Von Wrong” or “Wernher Von Brownnose” better?

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    It’s term time again and I’m back in college. One professor has laid out his AI policy: you should not use an AI (presumably Chat GPT) to write your assignment, but you can use an AI to proofread your assignment. This must be mentioned in the acknowledgements. He said in class that in his experience AI does not produce good results and that when asked to write about his particular field it produces work with a lot of mistakes.

    Me, I’m just wondering how you can tell the difference between material generated by AI then edited by a human, and material written by a human then edited by an AI.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      Here is what I wrote in the instructions for the term-paper project that I will be assigning my quantum-physics students this coming semester:

      I can’t very well stop you from using a text-barfing tool. I can, however, point out that the “AI” industry is a disaster for the environment, which is the place that we all have to live in; and that it depends upon datasets made by exploiting and indeed psychologically torturing workers. The point of this project is for you to learn a physics topic and how to write physics, not for you to abase yourself before a blurry average of all the things the Internet says about quantum physics — which, spoiler alert, includes a lot of wrong things. If you are going to spend your time at university not learning physics, there are better ways to do that than making yourself dependent upon a product that is a tech bubble waiting to pop.

      • gramie@lemmy.caEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        I was talking to someone recently and he mentioned that he has used AI for programming. It worked out fine, but the one thing he mentioned that really stuck with me was that when it was all done, he still didn’t know how to do the task.

        You can get things done, but you don’t learn how to do them.