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. Also, hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!)

  • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    OT: I tried switching away from my instance to quokk.au because it becomes harder and harder to justify being on a pro-ai instance, but it seems that your posts stopped federating recently. Which makes that a bit harder to do. Any clue why?

    • Jack Riddle[Any/All]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      bluemonday1984@awful.systems update: quokka reached out to me and apparently you had been banned on another instance for report abuse and that ban had synchronised to quokk.au. You should be unbanned now which means the next stubsack should federate again.

      E: I do not know how tags work E2: why does that format to a mailto link?

  • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    AI bros are seizing the means of computation: RAM, GPUs, SSDs and now HDDs…

    I don’t think there’s an actual conspiracy, just lots of MBAs following their noses towards the $$$.

    That said, time to buy a new lipo battery for that 10 year old laptop in the loft and stick Linux on it - before the lithium miners announce they’ve sold the next 12 months global supply of Lithium to Altman because he needs it to sleep at night…

    • kholerik (they/them)@social.tchncs.de
      0·
      23 days ago

      @samvines @BlueMonday1984 I wish we could finally agree that tech bros (and MBAs!) are greedy, full of shit and ruining the planet. And then remove both groups from any place of influence. If tech bros in particular were reduced to the role of village idiot, the world would be a much better place.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        I wish we could finally agree that tech bros (and MBAs!) are greedy, full of shit and ruining the planet. And then remove both groups from any place of influence.

        Prohibiting the teaching of MBAs and/or massively funding the humanities would be a good start. Hell, you could fund the humanities with the cash that currently goes toward MBAs and kill two birds with one stone.

    • Argonel@dice.camp
      0·
      23 days ago

      @samvines @BlueMonday1984 I just hope that the manufacturers are insisting on cash now for future deliveries, rather than assuming that Altman will have the money in the future when the data center that doesn’t exist using power from the powerplant that doesn’t exist is ready to install the storage in the computers that don’t exist.

  • lurker@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    new interview with Dario Amodei dropped https://youtu.be/n1E9IZfvGMA basically exponential curve real soon, nice skepticism from both the interviewer and the comment section

    On a related note, I really gotta stop browsing r/singularity man

    EDIT: this is also the same podcast where Dario said we could have AGI in 2-3 years back in 2023. So lol

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      yawn, i diagnose that LWer with weeb. this is something happening across entire industrialized world, causes being high performance mechanization of agriculture, old people being stubborn in regards to moving, lack of specialized work in countryside and couple of other factors. germany has patched their hospice staff shortage (not sure how effectively) with migrants, but japanese are way too racist for that. same thing happens in moldova, but you never hear sob stories about retired moldovans because they’re broke and nobody cares, while moldovan govt can’t really do much about it (because broke) to degree that it has not just economic and demographic, but even strategic effects. whole lotta drs strangelove in there

    • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
      0·
      23 days ago

      @o7___o7 @techtakes It was Arduino who emitted the llm generated circuit but I was tired and conflated two companies with similar names (whose products I don’t use) before going to bed. Now they’re trying to throw a flame war. Pay no attention.

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        You handled that whole unhinged situation like a champ.

        Seeing once respectable folks get trapped in this bullshit feels like watching my college pal smoke his first clove cigarette.

        It seems like, for certain kind of geek, code LLMs sit somewhere between “The One Ring but rubbish” and “mechanical meth.” They certainly feel powerful and productove, and god help anyone who hints otherwise.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      Limor Fried and I had a class together at MIT in 2001. This has no bearing on the present circumstances and offers me no real insight (anything I could say about our extremely limited interactions would amount to confirmation bias). It’s just the odd little factoid that comes to mind whenever adafruit Does Something Online.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      23 days ago

      they’ve jumped the shark a while back. ptorrone is relatively widely documented to go around harassing people (often using his partner as a shield excuse for doing so, just like this time), and a couple months back they sold to qualcomm

      This person “Charlie Stross”

      ah yes, that absolutely must be a pseudonym, and absolutely couldn’t be a real person

      such a fucking weird bit

      anyway yeah fuck adafruit. don’t buy their shit, there are other options (and often cheaper)

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        23 days ago

        Men on Mastodon who never snark on male founders, or CEOs, or engineers, or guys sharing their work, have decided to target Limor since she shared it.

        hey mr. adafruit watch this, I can weaponise oppression olympics too, I’m a trans woman from the third world: fuck off with profiteering from your selling out to the planet-destroying plagiarism machine that’s proudly empowering ICE and the IDF. it’s not your country that will pay the price for your meaningless carbon output to generate nonsense until it looks right. and you brag about it. pega teu fascism-assisted hardware design e enfia no cu. happy never to be an adafruit customer again. assholes.

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    A little exchange on the EA forums I thought was notable: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EDBQPT65XJsgszwmL/long-term-risks-from-ideological-fanaticism?commentId=b5pZi5JjoMixQtRgh

    tldr; a super long essay lumping together Nazism, Communism and religious fundamentalism (I didn’t read it, just the comments). The comment I linked notes how liberal democracies have also killed a huge number of people (in the commenter’s home country, in the name of purging communism):

    The United States presented liberal democracy as a universal emancipatory framework while materially supporting anti-communist purges in my country during what is often called the “Jakarta Method". Between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in 1965–66, with encouragement and intelligence support from Western powers. Variations of this model were later replicated in parts of Latin America.

    The OP’s response is to try to explain how that wasn’t real “liberal democracy” and to try to reframe the discussion. Another commenter is even more direct, they complain half the sources listed are Marxist.

    A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.

    I think it’s a bit bold of this commenter to ignore the empirical facts cited in how many people ‘liberal democracies’ had killed and to exclude sources simply for challenging your ideology.

    Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn’t considered even the most basic of leftist thought.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      Just another reminder of how the EA movement is full of right wing thinking and how most of it hasn’t considered even the most basic of leftist thought.

      I continue to maintain that EA boils down to high-dollar consumerism focused on intangible goods. I’m sure that statement won’t fly on LW or any other EA forum, but my thoughts on psychiatry don’t fly at a Scientologist convention either.

    • Oblomov@sociale.network
      0·
      22 days ago

      @scruiser @BlueMonday1984 funny how they mock left wingers for «that wasn’t real communism» and then come up with the same excuses for liberal democracies and capitalism whenever one points out all the shit that came out of that. It’s really ALWAYS projection with them, isn’t it?

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        21 days ago

        This reminds me of a discussion I had recently on a fanfic discord (the discussion was sparked by the March for Billionaires…). Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism, so I bring up China and the USSR, but apparently those don’t count for the person I was arguing with. They claimed the stats were Goodharted and also that what I was saying was tankie bullshit. I gave up at that point (I probably shouldn’t have bothered in the first place). Like how exactly did they fake or Goodhart going from literal feudalism to industrial superpowers? Also, I find it notable how EAs and “The Better Angels of Our Nature” type neoliberals are perfectly happy to use overall stats as metrics when it makes a point they are in favor of. “Your GDP went up 3.2%, please ignore the mass environmental devastation from colonialism and neocolonialism that makes your traditional way of life unlivable and thank us Westerners.”

          • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            20 days ago

            Yep, I should have realized that sooner, at least I gave up on that “discussion” before going further.

        • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          21 days ago

          Someone claimed no country had ever pulled itself out of poverty except by capitalism

          The funny thing is orthodox marxists wouldn’t necessarily disagree: capitalism is a necessary historical step towards communism. Not sure how that justifies the continued existence of exploitation and billionaires!

        • Oblomov@sociale.network
          0·
          21 days ago

          @scruiser there’s no winning with these guys. I had a similar experience with someone bringing up South Korea as an example of country that brought itself up by its bootstraps via unfettered capitalism because “planned economy doesn’t work”, so I had to remind them that SK was a military dictatorship who implemented 5-year plans leveraging billions of foreign investment that was given to it by US to prop it up against NK.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            21 days ago

            it’s crazy how people memoryholed that (and japan doing the same, and a handful of other countries). or how until 2022 war norway wasn’t really thought of as petrostate by people who didn’t pay attention. or how ten years ago, if you said that putin bombed apartments to wage war on chechenya to win elections all to pardon yeltsin, people would think that you’re a crackpot

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            21 days ago

            Nonono if it’s US backed then it’s capitalist and free market and good don’t you see /s

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    23 days ago

    https://softcurrency.substack.com/p/the-dangerous-economics-of-walk-away

    1. Anthropic (Medium Risk) Until mid-February of 2026, Anthropic appeared to be happy, talent-retaining. When an AI Safety Leader publicly resigns with a dramatic letter stating “the world is in peril,” the facade of stability cracks. Anthropic is a delayed fuse, just earlier on the vesting curve than OpenAI. The equity is massive ($300B+ valuation) but largely illiquid. As soon as a liquidity event occurs, the safety researchers will have the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.

    WTF is “even safer” ??? how bout we like just don’t create the torment nexus.

    Wonder if the 50% attrition prediction comes to pass though…

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      21 days ago

      So they’ve highlighted an interesting pattern to compensation packages, but I find their entire framing of it gross and disgusting, in a capitalist techbro kinda way.

      Like the way the describe Part III’s case study:

      The uncapped payouts were so large that it fractured the relationship between Capital (Activision) and Labor (Infinity Ward).

      Acitivision was trying to cheat its labor after they made them massively successful profits! Describing it as a fracture relationship denies the agency on the Acitivision’s part to choose to be greedy capitalist pigs.

      The talent that left formed the core of the team that built Titanfall and Apex Legends, franchises that have since generated billions in revenue, competing directly in the same first-person shooter market as Call of Duty.

      Activision could have paid them what they owed them, and kept paying them incentive based payouts, and come out billions of dollars ahead instead of engaging in short-sighted greedy behavior.

      I would actually find this article interesting and tolerable if they framed it as “here are the perverse incentives capitalism encourages businesses to create” instead of “here is how to leverage the perverse incentives in your favor by paying your employees just enough, but not enough to actually reward them a fair share” (not that they were honest enough to use those words).

      WTF is “even safer” ??? how bout we like just don’t create the torment nexus.

      I think the writer isn’t even really evaluating that aspect, just thinking in terms of workers becoming capital owners and how companies should try to prevent that to maximize their profits. The idea that Anthropic employees might care on any level about AI safety (even hypocritically and ineffectually) doesn’t enter into the reasoning.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      “even safer” in this case means some combination of two things:

      1. The new organization is more ideologically aligned with the transhumanist doom cult that apparently managed to eat the brains of the people with money to burn.

      2. The new organization, largely as a result of this, is capable of sinking an unending amount of capital into buying compute time and Nvidia chips but due to their commitments to safety is even less inclined to actually deliver anything.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      the capital to fund their own, even safer labs.

      I wonder, is this a theory of “safety” analogous to what’s driven the increased gigantism of vehicles in the US? Sure seems like it.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    22 days ago

    i’ve collided with an article* https://harshanu.space/en/tech/ccc-vs-gcc/

    you might be wondering why it doesn’t highlight that it fails to compile linux kernel, or why it states that using pieces of gcc where vibecc fails is “fair”, or why it neglects to say that failing linker means it’s not useful in any way, or why just relying on “no errors” isn’t enough when it’s already known that vibecc will happily eat invalid c. it’s explained by:

    Disclaimer

    Part of this work was assisted by AI. The Python scripts used to generate benchmark results and graphs were written with AI assistance. The benchmark design, test execution, analysis and writing were done by a human with AI helping where needed.

    even with all this slant, by their own vibecoded benchmark, vibecc is still complete dogshit with sqlite compiled with it being slower up to 150000x times in some cases

    • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      22 days ago

      This is why CCC being able to compile real C code at all is noteworthy. But it also explains why the output quality is far from what GCC produces. Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.

      Every single one of these failures is waved away because supposedly it’s impressive that the AI can do this at all. Do they not realize the obvious problem with this argument? The AI has been trained on all the source code that Anthropic could get their grubby hands on! This includes GCC and clang and everything remotely resembling a C compiler! If I took every C compiler in existence, shoved them in a blender, and spent $20k on electricity blending them until the resulting slurry passed my test cases, should I be surprised or impressed that I got a shitty C compiler? If an actual person wrote this code, they would be justifiably mocked (or they’re a student trying to learn by doing, and LLMs do not learn by doing). But AI gets a free pass because it’s impressive that the slop can come in larger quantities now, I guess. These Models Will Improve. These Issues Will Get Fixed.

      • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        Building a compiler that parses C correctly is one thing. Building one that produces fast and efficient machine code is a completely different challenge.

        Ye, the former can be done in a month of non-full-time work by an undergrad who took Compilers 101 this semester or in literally a single day by a professional, and the latter is an actual useful product.

        So of course AI will excel at doing the first one worse (vibecc doesn’t even reject invalid C) and at an insane resource cost.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        22 days ago

        spent $20k on electricity blending them

        They would probably be even more impressed that you only spent $20k