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 this quality nickname for prompt receivers: Chet Jippity
This bounced off of the earlier stub about LLM recipes to create a new cooking show: Chef Jippity. The contestants are all sous chefs at a new restaurant, with the head of the kitchen being some dumbass who blindly follows the instructions of an LLM. Can you work around the robot to create edible food or will Chef Jippity run this whole thing into the ground and lose everyone their jobs? Find out Thursday on Food Network!
Deceased: sous chefs
Increased: sue chefs
In French, ChatGPT sounds like « Chatte, j’ai pété » meaning “Pussy, I farted”.
An unnamed OSS project had its license vandalized by AI:
Its currently unnamed to avoid naming-and-shaming any specific devs, but its probably a Mozilla project that was affected.
Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:
https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z
“Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker”
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 real missed opportunity to end that post mid-sentence
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 Sub-hypothesis 1B: the AI was fed the whole book but the input was truncated because whatever toolchain they used wasn’t made to handle 160k words at a time.
Best part is the footnote:
About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.
Stephenson knows how computers work.
@dgerard he does, looks like
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 please do not insult the noble machine consciousnesses thus. It was probably written by a venture capitalist.
Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.
“Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”
Andreessen Horowitz? More like, And here’s some horse shit
@swlabr yup
Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.
…sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.
…no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?
“Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.
The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”
It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?
truly massive
fuzzy logic says this thing has mass most of the time, ish
english is a fuck
(Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)
Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)
tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth
but he never helps huck finn out financially?
pretty shit story, mark
@gerikson @BlueMonday1984 The only thing that could have made that article better is if he’d literally ended it mid-sentence.
Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends
(His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)
Years ago, I said, “I’ve never finished a Stephenson novel.” Someone replied, “Neither has he.”
oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time
We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.
Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.
Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave
https://iceberg.mit.edu/report.pdf “We simulated 131 million human beings using LLMs and found 11% of jobs could be done by AI instead of humans” I can’t tell what’s real with LLMs anymore. I wonder if that’s the point.
So I got jumpscared recently by that couple. I was listening to one of my many favourite podcasts, Threedom, when on the most recent episode, “I Definitely Tuned Out and I Agree With You”, this exchange happened, starting around 44 minutes, give or take 10 for ads.
spoiler tagged exchange, in case you are a pisspig* and don't want spoilers.
Context: the hosts are talking about how they value fostering their children’s expressive abilities, even if that means their children do things like scream in inappropriate situations.
Scott: I guess what I’m trying to say is that some parents would look at us, and say, like, “oh, you’re not teaching them how to act in social situations or whatever,”
Paul: Yes, you should slap them across the face, in the store.
<laughter>
Scott: Who was that… that… that, like, person who… there’s some parent out there that thinks that you need to like have a million kids or whatever and uh, and a paper writer followed them around and he just smacked his kid right in front of the paper writ-, er… the journalist? Uh, anyway…
Lauren: Paper writer?
Scott: Yeah, sorry, sorry, Journalist.
Paul: Couldn’t sound more specific, and yet I don’t know.
<end of reference>
Tried too hard transcribing this and still feel like I did a bad job.
Anyway, gosh, congrats to them on their extreme success in being platformed. Couldn’t have been a more deserving couple. /s
*pisspig is the name given to a fan of the podcast Threedom. The fans picked the name, the hosts aren’t really sure why.
I do think this is the optimal way for the couple to be referenced in media.
Semi-relevant, Matthew Garrett has won a court case against the kooks running Techrights:
https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115581959497817474
About the only positive thing you can say about Schestowitz (and probably his wife) is that they are rabidly anti-AI, but that is only because they are also rabidly against anyone who does not subscribe to their personal purity-test vision of Free Software (basically it’s them, RMS, and maybe his parrot).
I have an unhealthy interest in them, because during the Andrew Lee putsch they were basically on his side, until he fucked even them, and I kinda drifted into their IRC server to see what was up. It was my unwelcome introduction to the toxic underbelly of FLOSS, with rampant RMS-worship, misogyny, racism and incipient techno-fascism. I ducked out quite quickly.
Tellingly, Techrights is all in on the Gemini protocol.
for what it’s worth schestowitzes don’t seem to understand that they lost a defamation case and should stop digging.
That seems potentially unwise.
such words never stopped dr. roy before.
I never heard of Techrights before, they seem rather unhinged, but I had a good laugh when I saw this article about Lunduke. Not even the floss fundamentalists like Lundukes flavor of racist Linux “journalism”.
No idea if it was intentional given how long a series’ production cycle can be before it ends up on tv/streaming, but it’s hard not to see Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus as a weird extended impact-of-chatbots metaphor.
It’s also somewhat tedious and seems to be working under the assumption that cool cinematography is a sufficient substitute for character development.
BB and BCS were both kinda slow burns IMO. That’s not to say the new show is worth holding onto (haven’t seen it), just commenting on the trend.
Noted for the amusing headline: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03506-6
Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written fully by AI Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Do note that it appears to be an advert for ai peer review detection services, but I was still tickled by the whole “why are there leopards at our face-eating conference” surprise being expressed.
There’s base-level sneer as this is posted on LW, but I found this comparison of LLM in call centers to cheap human labor for the same interesting:
So I’m not double checking their work because that’s more of a time and energy investment than I’m prepared for here. I also do not have the perspective of someone who has actually had to make the relevant top-level decisions. But caveats aside I think there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here:
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It’s actually heartening to see that even the LW comments open by bringing up how optimistic this analysis is about the capabilities of LLM-based systems. “Our chatbot fucked up” has some significant fiscal downsides that need to be accounted for.
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The initial comparison of direct API costs is interesting because the work of setting up and running this hypothetical replacement system is not trivial and cannot reasonably be outsourced to whoever has the lowest cost of labor due. I would assume that the additional requirements of setting up and running your own foundation model similarly eats through most of the benefits of vertical integration, even before we get into how radically (and therefore disastrously) that would expand the capabilities of most companies. Most organizations that aren’t already tech companies couldn’t do it, and those that could will likely not see the advertised returns.
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I’m not sure how much of the AI bubble we’re in is driven even by an expectation of actual financial returns at this point. To what extent are we looking at an investor and managerial class that is excited to put “AI” somewhere on their reports because that’s the current Cutting Edge of Disruptive Digital Transformation into New Paradigms of Technology and Innovation and whatever else all these business idiots think they’re supposed to do all day.
I’m actually going to ignore the question of what happens to the displaced workers here because the idea that this job is something that earns a decent living wage is still just as dead if it’s replaced by AI or outsourced to whoever has the fewest worker protections. That said, I will pour one out for my frontline IT comrades in South Africa and beyond. Whenever this question is asked the answer is bad for us.
I’ve worked in an adjacent field (workforce planning) and I deliver B2B software support for a living, so I too have Thoughts.
At least here in Schwedenland, contact centers have been filed down by relentless cost and tech pressure to be about as automated as can be. You have websites with FAQs, simple chatbots that basically repeat the FAQ for those for whom reading more than a sentence of text is too hard, phone trees to gatekeep you from the Inner Sanctum, etc. etc. The end result is that the actual people taking the calls are gonna be the ones who can make human decisions - troubleshoot a complex issue, handle insurance claims, upsell your mortgage.
Trying to att LLM voice tech to that is just going to add another filter between the customer and the center, with the additional reputational risk of the robot fucking up and losing the customer.
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He somehow did an ad read in the middle of a substack post. Sign of the times.
That he’s being sponsored by DeleteMe is oddly fitting in its own right. Were it not for surveillance capitalism relentlessly stealing personal data and invading people’s privacy, its services would be completely unnecessary.
Crosslinking SRD: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1p88k7d/guys_were_gonna_be_okay_maybe_not_today_maybe_not/
Observing AI psychosis from a distance is so fascinating. “Valentine just got nerfed for me.” What???
people out there signing off shit like that with their online presence that wouldn’t be waterboarded out of anyone 15 years ago
The rise of social media has made people disturbingly willing to give out extremely personal info/secrets. Jesus.
Robin Hanson has a sneerworthy level of hubris that has lead to him falling for all sorts of BS over the years (he’s long argued that being an economist makes him more rational and better at working out the truth than domain experts at all fields of science, apparently because only economists have heard of incentives) but I was still surprised to learn he’s now a UFO conspiracy nut.
Presumably he caught some History channel rerun of Ancient Aliens and was struck by how much more plausible it was than his “Age of Em” theory.
Also credulously reiterating Trump’s stupid “Department of War” rebrand… makes me think his writing is narrowly targeted at a certain group
What’s more plausible, that I made a bad assumption in my fermi estimation or that all the world’s governments have been undertaking the most wildly successful coverup for nearly a century with no leaks or failures? Clearly the latter.
Hanson into conspiracies, Goertzel into parapsychology, going well on the rational/transhuman side.
Whats your P(Yakub)
0 isnt a real probability, so i gotta give it the gentleman’s 50:50
kinda impressive that “Factor Fexcectorn” shows up twice, imagine how many credits were offered on the pyre of context management
also what in the cursed fuck is going on with the glyphs over the “meter” bars
Factor Fexcectorn sounds like a Roman centurion who tried to improve the army’s logistics by hitching multiple wagons together in sequence.
I was thinking Factor Fexcectorn was the name of a furry OC, with an extensive backstory and a surprising amount of commissioned art. Fits in a fantasy or sci fi setting or both. Oh god am I writing an OC
Oh god am I writing an OC
the ao3 submission form calls you forth
The Fexcectorns are a storied family of fox-unicorn hybrids NO STOP GET OUT OF MY HEAD
I’m the left leg clipping through the table. Also, i like how x axis on lower left chart is out of order
The article’s abstract made me die a hundred times
hey siri can you write me a nothing paper that combines two popular topics that are easy to bullshit about
Good day to remember the rat dck pck.
And this is not the first time Scientific Reports has been sneered.
This artifact can bring bio med people on-side like nothing else.
“K9: scom”, just need to figure out what scom is.
But my favorite part is in the upper left, the brain that just says “Autism” and “Autism” around it.
these are autism particles
Wow. Quantum nature of autism confirmed. And people say the slop machines can’t do science…
… Autons?
Automs
for years the human experience has vastly exceeded the codifications of mere simplistic scientist narrative, and it has long been known that the standard model was all wrong. in this essay I will
There’s a PubPeer thread.
idk what i have expected
Tołalbottl
I’m “LIne storee” babyee.
Just wanted to say that I’m thankful for all yall.
just found out about the incredibly dystopian US prison “ADX”
Inside the federal supermax tucked away in Colorado’s high desert, prisoners spend 22 to 24 hours a day locked alone inside concrete cells that are smaller than a standard parking space. The prison, formally called United States Penitentiary Florence Administrative Maximum Facility but better known as ADX, has earned the nickname “The Alcatraz of the Rockies” because of its harsh conditions.
Contact with others is extremely limited; programming, such as anger management or religious services, is broadcast over televisions in the cells, while psychological evaluations happen through the steel doors. Belongings are also strictly limited and prisoners aren’t allowed to hang photographs or drawings on their walls. Exercise time out the cell happens alone inside large cages called “dog runs”, where prisoners can only walk a few paces each direction. Prisoners are given virtual reality goggles to simulate the outdoors or community. A former warden once called ADX a “clean version of hell,” and said that living there was “far much worse than death.” Olympic Park bomber Eric Robert Rudolph and Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are both incarcerated at ADX.
