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)
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop
this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious
if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.
Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.
“socialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsides”
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there’s people who don’t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they’re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
Weird way to say he doesn’t talk to many women
eigen “Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee” robot
Oh but you see it’s not regressive because it’s polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermensch’s children
almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
Oh, he’s apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197
Knowing the context doesn’t really change anything about this tweet though.
why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
Status. Also just a bit of kink and ‘proving’ heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).
I’ve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
eigen “I’ll call it ironic if people call me on my shit” robot
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.
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.
For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:
https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397
Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.
Electric Wizard 🤝Donald Trump
“Legalize Drugs & Murder”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.
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.
Zuck says lots more slop coming your way soon
“I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”
Facebook is already one Meta platform where AI generated content, sometimes referred to as “AI slop,” is increasingly common.
mm I wonder what kind of content they’ll want to use that for
Go home Coursera, you’re drunk.
Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.
Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email’s text was white-on-white.
How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about “prompt engineering”? It’s like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.
Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.
Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That’s not stank, that’s the luck diffusing out into the universe.
Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.
Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!
Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.
That will be $200 please.
Thanks, Google. You know, I used to be pretty good at getting consistent, useful results from your search engine, but the improvements you’ve made to it since the make me feel like I really might need a fucking prompt engineering course to find things on the internet these days. By which I mean something that’ll help you promptly engineer the internet back into a form where search engines work correctly.
Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:
In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.
Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people’s livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.
I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake.
Raytheon can at least claim they’re helping kill terrorists or some shit like that, Artisan’s just going out and saying “We ruin good people’s lives for money, and we can help you do that too”
Grift tech that claims to do awful shit that ruins everyone’s lives, but really just makes Stanford grads sit around pretending to invent something while funneling VC money directly in their bloodstreams.
You’d think these would overflow the evil scale and end up back into being ethical but really they’re just doing the same thing as the non-vaporware evil companies with just some extra steps.
Right? At least it the knife missile does what it says on the tin.
Apologies in advance for the Rick and Morty reference, but Artisan seems to be roughly congruent to “Simple Rick” candy bars.
The (poorly executed) distillation of the life’s work of actually talented and interesting people, sold as a direct replacement, to fill a void that the customer doesn’t even know exists.
Ah, Huntsville. Where the downtown convention hall is the Werner von Braun Center.
🎶 the man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience 🎶
You don’t get it, this is a likely bribe
yikes, good call! I couldn’t get past the Borderlands 2 vibes, but you’re right.
it’s like generalized manufacturing consent
Help me out, the coffee isn’t working today and I still don’t get it. How does bribery fit in?
Ads are used to influence customers, right, but how many people on train station are about to buy a fighter jet or a tank? (Maybe it’s a part of recruitment strategy) If they wanted to influence DoD or elected representatives then there are more direct options
Instead, remember that ads are paid for, and nobody needs to know how much, and that money probably is much less tightly controlled
yep, and alongside: go-nowhere hype-du-jour businesses are a remarkably good vehicle for pushing money from A->B for many of these people
? that’s raytheon, a large company with multiple state customers that delivers what it says in spec, not anduril
I don’t mean just raytheon/MICshit but also the broader use of the technique by extraction-grifters
Ah, thankyou for bearing with me, I see what you mean.
I just assumed there must be a large military office nearby and they were targeting the procurement personnel who do the actual contract and tender work, plus maybe the manufacturer headquarters is nearby and this is part of one of the more revolting symptoms of a highly militarized capitalist culture. I didn’t get quite as far as drawing the connection to targeting politicians and staffers who likely can’t put a meeting with missile sales reps on their publicly documented calendars, but that makes a lot of sense.
there’s another thing in american context specifically: generally keeping defense manufacturers in state is a popular decision among voters (both parties) because it brings DoD contracts (lots of money) and well paid both blue and white collar jobs. this in turn influences back procurement decisions (a bit) (hey, my state has a factory of this junk obsolete since it was on drawing board (like A10), can you put some money in it? closing that factory would lose me an election)
this is more clearly seen in nuclear weapons manufacture, against all logic it’s spread around the country with little reliable logistics between these sites
My sense growing up in Huntsville was that the airport ads for defense contractors were kind of like, e.g., Exxon sponsoring a pavilion at EPCOT. The intent wasn’t to push any specific consumer towards buying any specific product, but to pump out a positive image for the company generally.
And a lot of those contractors’ people fly through Huntsville on business. (For those not in the know: The airport is just down the highway from Redstone Arsenal, which is where we brought all them Nazis we recruited to help us beat the Commies to the Moon. The only reason Huntsville exists as more than a sleepy/dying cotton mill town is the space program and missile warfare.) There may well be deals along the lines of “advertise here and your people get the cushy lounge”.
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
cobol devs in shambles
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.
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.
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.
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 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
Cursed .gov link:
TL;DR: Our main characters have bilked a very credulous US State Department. 100 Million tax dollars will now be converted into entropy. There will also be committees.
—What kind of gambling do you usually have here?
—Oh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.
Going outside awful’s wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the world’d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like “whoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, we’ll get a policy in place”.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Logan’s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
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-pilot, 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) ? 🤔
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 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.
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 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
I mean yud is only really a guru on his own farts
classic warning case of someone getting high on their own supply
Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/
we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other
anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:
The error message ‘userld and score are required’ is unclear. It should be more specific, such as ‘Missing userld or score in the request body’.
aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?
- a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
- a machine can’t read this
- if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency
I want someone to fork the Linux kernel and then unleash like 10 Copilots to make PRs and review each other. No human intervention. Then plot the number of critical security vulnerabilities introduced over time, assuming they can even keep it compilable for long enough.
Does a kernel that crashes itself before it can process any malicious inputs count as secure?
Technically yes, but a rock is even more secure and cheaper than a computer and a programmer
Sshh don’t tell the investors, I’ve managed to be paid for a decade by updating my code to work with other people updating their code to work with other people updating their code, all without actually doing anything new.
We as a profession have developed a careful balancing act where we’re always busy doing nothing. If the balance was off just a little someone might actually have to think about new features instead of, say, migrating from CGI to PHP to JavaScript to jQuery to AngularJS to Angular to React to ???, rejecting LLM generated changes, “fixing” the same bug year after year, or reverting reverts of reverts of reverts of reverts of changes.
And thinking is hard.
that’d be an interesting experiment but also that’s $2400 you could spend on more useful things, like bootstrapping your whiskey collection
$2400 is hardly a number compared to whatever we’re already spending on genAI so fuck it
@self did somebody make an extension that replaces github copilot with ELIZA yet
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?
