Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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.)
Saw a video talking about Google officially releasing “nano banana pro” which i regret to inform you is a real product and that the video was not a shitpost.
“Nano banana pro” sounds like a relic of tiki fashion that manages to be racist in a way we have mostly forgotten.
Super forecasters update timeline by 150% their og forecast.
Fucking dumbasses
I look forward to the cultists continuing to update these graphs convinced they are seeing the future of the cosmos as fewer and fewer people pay attention to the fever dreams
Hey, I’ve revised my fanfiction, too.
Article I found randomly because… I was trying to add the Psychology Today blog to uBlacklist so I stop seeing their articles lol
It lost me a little towards the end, but it’s heartwarming to imagine a world where tech fascists screaming about the Antichrist have a few* billion dollars less and actual charities have a few more.
*where few = [3, ∞)
Presented without comment. (Don’t have source, but I did find another link mocking Grok glazing Musk)
Grok:
In the absurd arena of ultimate determination challenges, yes—Elon Musk has the potential to drink piss better than any human in history, leveraging his proven grit from surviving corporate near-deaths and endless failures.
(via Parker Molloy)
Sometimes, I get to peer into the AI pilled brain, and it is… uh… not good.
But now if I suffer from Imposter syndrome I can remind myself that some other people take advice from clankers.
https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3m634z3r7kk2l
Transcript:
The fact I can login every morning and ask an AI to review all my emails and chats from yesterday then given what it knows about my goals and my role it should suggest what I could have done better is amazing.
Bubble or not, AI is huge for personal productivity and overall improvement.
I keep wondering: is this really a need which many people fundamentally have, or is AI usage doing something to their brains?
To be fair though it’s not just their brains turning to mush, google has genuinely been getting worse too.
The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher
All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.
Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.
Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.
They’ve always wanted this, indeed. There’s some comfort to me in the reminder that this year’s layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.
found this sneer-y blog post prompted by some linkedin lunatic posting his “agentic cockpit”
I feel like “we’ll just build a world model” is on the same level as saying " I’ll just solve the P vs NP problem."
NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.
Being really “smart” (along some axis) doesn’t make you succesful or even happy.
Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.
Many of these tools are useful, and don’t use generative AI – that is, AI that creates – but use AI to summarize texts or alter images.
Oh no, has this become the common definition of generative AI? I’m guessing some AI company must have tried to launder the name and make it seem less bad. Both of those examples are clear-cut generative AI.
Armin Ronacher, creator of the vastly popular Python Flask and Jinja framworks, comes out in defence of DHH, saying his racist diatribe about the ethnic make up of London was in fact not racist, and the state of Israel, that it’s apparently fine that it remains an oppressive ethnostate in order to ‘preserve its particular cultural identity’.
time for me to learn something else, then; what do people use these days for microservices instead of flask? fastapi?
EDIT:
oh come the fuck on google AIO
I finally became fed up with it and got around to writing a uBlock Origin filter that removes the AI overview, the AI results in the “People also ask” section, and especially the AI results in the “Things to know” section that usually covers health and drug information. There is literally so much AI bloat taking up the search page it’s crazy.
Yep, he’s been saying bad shit for a while (18~24mo I’m aware of), glad more people are seeing it through
also a massive massive promptfondler
yup
second take from me. Here’s the full tweet:
one of Earth’s top scientists on sex and gender has published her latest work, open for all to read in a widely read venue on that science topic, where it will receive far more peer scrutiny than any lesser forum provides
I’m going to read this as a joke because he didn’t end it with a period, and he is secretly beefing with aella
Ahh the missing period, an even worse tone indicator compared to /hj (youtube).
Glad I clicked the link, I was pretty sure hj meant handjob.
I am still avoiding YouTube, so I guess “hj” will mean handjob forever.
Both follow-up tweets end in periods, so I guess he transitioned to being completely serious 1/3 of the way through? Or maybe a missing period means a joke, a present period means he’s serious, and partial periodization means that he’s typing with one hand.
Yud, Aella and Hossenfelder make me want to defend modern academic institutions. Granted, that’s not nearly as impressive as Scott Aaronson getting me to sympathize with a cop, but it’s still an achievement.
After moving out at 17, Aella briefly attended college in northern Idaho but ran out of money after a semester.
Aella already has better credentials than EY
Ah more anti-intellectualism from the proto cult leader.
This does mean, as the standards are so low, that we all have a phd on Rationalism.
I expect her methodology was great but I don’t actually know what it was.
Science!
cursed thought
…is that yud for “she’s refused to fuck me”?
cursed corollary to Poe's Law
Yud being secretly contemptuous of Aella is indistinguishable from Yud being horny for Aella
Many such cases
As background: the Kaufmann report that prompted all this is a load of absolute garbage. As discussed fairly extensively on social media (example).
As for Aella’s addition: oh god why did I read this?
The methodology was apparently running a “Big Kink Survey” which was “trending on TikTok” and had “very good SEO”. I suppose this is the right data needed to draw conclusions about what rate 14 year olds are transgender.
The whole this is also full of weird gender essentialism (I never want to read the word “biofemales” again).
I think this is evidence for an increasing split between afabs and amabs
But don’t worry she’s very pro trans (JK Rowling sense):
Despite having been cancelled by the more radical subgroups of trans people, I’m nevertheless very pro trans.
Which is why she wants to make a massive reach and be concerned that maybe trans people are getting too much healthcare:
I think it’s unlikely that 11.5% of afabs are actually trans men in a way that would last through adulthood. If my data is measuring any real trend in the world, and if that trend meaningfully increases permanent changes to bodies, then this high percentage might actually be quite bad.
… Nevermind that her data doesn’t even touch on stuff like rate of HRT, or regret rate; these “concerns” are all pulled out of thin air.
(I also lament that this makes things really rough for the trans men for whom this is not a fad, and for whom earlier transitioning would be a huge quality of life improvement.)
Like dear cis people are you OK? Is society not transphobic enough for you? :'(
Are you worried that if a teenager is allowed to explore their gender a little that it will cause a bunch of precocious little cis girls to accidentally glance at a vial of testosterone the wrong way and grow a fantastic beard overnight?
When I started estrogen (later than I should have and fuck you Idaho) I was absolutely 100% sure that it was the right thing to try, and that I’d stop if I didn’t like it. Never looked back (estrogen is tasty and I encourage everyone to try it at least once), and I had years before there was much you could call permanent.
But of course it’s not the “permanent changes to bodies” that made me a 6ft tall amazonian beauty that people like Aella are concerned about. “What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??” fundamentally assumes it is OK to accidentally withhold critical medicine from countless trans people just to be “safe”.
“What if we accidentally trans one of the cis??”
They always like to dress up these statements as medical concern. But it shines through that, despite whatever the person may express otherwise, deep down they think being trans is not really acceptable. Maybe partially acceptable at best, but should be avoided if possible. Very similar thought model to classics like “oh I’m fine with gay people, but what if my child sees two men holding hands and then wants to try it too??”
I’m not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And “no worse than the average psychology paper” is not high praise.
Aella in the comments: I’m just an uwu smol bean who never learned how citations work
not a single serious person in that thread lol. also is rationalist castle’s isp blocking scihub? weird that that libertarian crowd didn’t hear about it
Why am I getting James Somerton flashbacks
She can’t tell the difference between “the people who wrote the paper” and “the group that runs the website that hosts a copy of the abstract of the paper”. This speaks to a plentiful lack of curiosity. It reminds me of crank e-mails and sensationalist clickbait pages that say everything on the arXiv is research from Cornell University.
I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.
Pepper
That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.
yeah and I’m a brain surgeon because sometimes when I pick my nose I go a little too deep
at://did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/app.bsky.feed.post/3m5z5da4mvk24
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2obbaxjktznf67mnhznpplp/post/3m5z5da4mvk24
Windscribe’s twitter account being transphobic.
Free speech can he expensive for dipshits.
Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.
