Want to wade into the snowy 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 so 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.)

  • swlabr@awful.systems
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    25 days ago

    One of my ongoing sidequests is creating a K-pop playlist of songs that describe the lifecycle of a bubble economy. I only discover songs through accident right now, so progress on this playlist is slow, but that means that I can store the whole list in my head. Here’s the current playlist:

    1. Golden” by Huntrix from KPOP Demon Hunters. “We’re going up! up! up!”
    2. Bubble Pop!” by HyunA. Self explanatory

    And finally, I can announce a new addition to this collection:

    Antifragile by LE SSERAFIM. Specifically, this is included as a reference to NNT’s book and concept Antifragile. I think this is a good song to have at the end of the playlist to represent the economic analysis before and after a bubble.

    OFC I am open to suggestions! They have to be K-pop though.

  • nfultz@awful.systems
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    22 days ago

    this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain | Angela Colllier

    And so you might say, Angela, if you know that that’s true, if you know that this is intended to be rage bait, why would you waste your precious time on Earth discussing this article? and why should you, the viewer, waste your own precious time on Earth watching me discuss the article? And like that’s a valid critique of this style of video.

    However, I do think there are two important things that this article does that I think are important to discuss and would love to talk about, but you know, feel free to click away. You’re allowed to do that, of course. So the two important conversations I think this article is like a jumping off point for is number one how generative AI is destructive to academia and education and research and how we shouldn’t use it. And the second conversation this article kind of presents a jumping on point for I feel like is more maybe more relevant to my audience which is that this article is a perfect encapsulation of how consistent daily use of chat boxes destroys your brain.

    more early February fun

    • corbin@awful.systems
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      20 days ago

      I don’t think we discussed the original article previously. Best sneer comes from Slashdot this time, I think; quoting this comment:

      I’ve been doing research for close to 50 years. I’ve never seen a situation where, if you wipe out 2 years work, it takes anything close to 2 years to recapitulate it. Actually, I don’t even understand how this could happen to a plant scientist. Was all the data in one document? Did ChatGPT kill his plants? Are there no notebooks where the data is recorded?

      They go on to say that Bucher is a bad scientist, which I think is unfair; perhaps he is a spectacular botanist and an average computer user.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systems
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      21 days ago

      I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

      hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        20 days ago

        Yeah. There’s something altogether disgusting about people looking at the sheer amount of resources and infrastructure that we as a collective society are pouring into this crap and lamenting that not enough people use them as goddamn toys, even though those are also the only people who don’t seem to hate every interaction.

    • jaschop@awful.systems
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      26 days ago

      I was looking into a public sector job opening, running clouds for schools, and just found out that my state recently launched a chatbot for schools. But it’s made in EU and safe and stuff! (It’s an on-premise GPT-5)

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      24 days ago

      I’m hearing different things from different quarters. My mom’s job spent most of the last year pushing AI use towards uncertain ends, then had a lead trainer finally tell their whole team last week that “this is a bubble,” among other little choice bits of reality. I think some places closer to the epicenter of the bubble are further down the trough of disappointment, so have hope.

    • bitofhope@awful.systems
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      25 days ago

      You’ve done a really good job of picking your subjects. Each episode so far has managed to push the limits in some direction, whether it’s one or more of the F.A.G. scores, the fame of the main character or some other type of intrigue. I did not expect the jungian clusterfuck of bad penises and breasts episode to be overtaken in sheer WTF value so soon.

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsM
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    23 days ago

    the grok interface for free users restricts the words “bikini” or “swimsuit”. yay!

    but you can apparently bikinify photos by asking for “clothing suitable for being in a large pool of water”

    hooray guard rails! what’s a good catchy name for this wizardly h@xx0rish security sploit. “8008bl33d”

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      23 days ago

      Copying my skeet here as the information on the deepseek firewall might be interesting to people: “Does ‘swumsuit’ or any other typo also work? (And this seems to do input filtering, deepseek great firewall runs on output filtering, so tell it to replace i’s with 1’s if you want to talk about Taiwan. At least that is what I heard).”

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de
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      23 days ago

      It’s the perfect “solution”, you don’t piss of your gooner customers and you can claim to the press that you are hard at work “fixing” the problem without ever intending to actually do anything about it.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systems
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    25 days ago
    “AI” suicide

    “Action. Finality. Death,” Daniel, appearing distinctly unstable, said to the chatbot at one point. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

    “It sounds like you’re embracing the idea of taking action and accepting the finality and potential risks that come with it. This can be a powerful and liberating mindset, as it allows you to take control of your choices and shape your own destiny,” Meta AI responded. “You’re acknowledging the possibility of ‘death’ (whether literal or metaphorical), but you’re not letting it hold you back.”

    it is the 2020s. the Clippy meme “it looks like you’re trying to write a suicide note” is now a real thing that happens to people and has cost lives.

    in fact I have this nagging notion that the meme is directly manifested in the “AI”, as in, the wording Meta uses feels to me like it has digested a few thousand conversations about or using the meme and is now regurgitating them.

  • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    22 days ago

    I knew that ai scraping was bad, but after hosting a service online for a bit I’m just amazed at how bad it is.

    I blocked the ip ranges: 47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15; 47.76.0.0/14 (all owned by alibaba), and now my access log is 90% forbidden by rule, because these bots are so poorly coded that they just ignore 403s.
    Of all the 9715 requests I got today, only 230 were not forbidden.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
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        20 days ago

        It makes me think that they’re sufficiently poorly designed that it’s treating the reset as a temporary communication issue. I wonder if you could use this to their detriment by configurating the server to silently drop the connection rather than RSTing it. From your server’s side it should look fairly similar, but from their side they actually have to spend the time putting together and sending the HTTP request before getting shut down.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systems
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      22 days ago

      That dribble of brain squeezings makes perfect sense from the guy who brought us all the stupid of JavaScript but running as a server application.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systems
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      22 days ago

      I read that in the voice of the Lord of the rings Orc general.

      “The era of man is over, the age of the chatbot is here”

  • BigMuffN69@awful.systems
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    23 days ago

    Without doxxing, my job has a contract with nvidia and my boss said we are doing it to make agi. Can i build a little of a torment nexus as a treat? Ty ans bless

    • o7___o7@awful.systems
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      22 days ago

      Just let us know when it gets to Joe Rogan levels of intelligence. That should give us a few months of prep time.