Be proud. May the spirit of Doug McIlroy smile at you from heaven. When he gets there one day.
Bistable multivibrator
Non-state actor
Tabs for AI indentation, spaces for AI alignment
410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
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bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish8·1 day agoFucking monodactyl ass cat
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish12·2 days agoTurdstock? Wow, the name immediately says this is a festival worth attending! The picture only strengthens the feeling.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish11·2 days agoSuppose further that enough powerful people are concerned about the poverty in Ireland, anti-catholic discrimination, food insecurity, and/or loss of rental revenue, that there’s significant political will to Do Something. Should we ban starvation? Should we decolonise? Should we export their produce harder to finally starve Ireland? Should we sign some kind of treaty? Should we have a national megaproject to replace the population with the British? Many of these options are seriously considered.
Enter the baseline option: Let the Irish sell their babies as a delicacy.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish9·3 days agoThe whole internet loves Éspèrature Trouvement, the grumpy old racist! 5 seconds later We regret to inform you the racist is not that old and actually has a pretty normal name. Also don’t look up his runescape username.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish4·4 days agoI’ve always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I’m the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he’s saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that’s just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish5·4 days agoA thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by “summaries” I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.
“Worse than useless” would be an understatement.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish5·4 days agoI appreciate the reference having read half a dozen Astérix albums in the last few days. I just hope our Alesia has yet to come.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish10·4 days agoHere’s my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!
After binge reading, these are really good.
Wow, that’s some primo pretentious wank about computer touching. Those links don’t explain jack shit. I kinda dig it.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•‘AI is here to stay’ — is it, though? What do you mean, ‘stay’?English11·11 days agoEspecially galling when the sentence starts with “like it or not”. Wrong. AI is not like a disease or a natural law that stays with us whether we want it or not. If humanity decides we don’t like AI, we could just stop doing it. “Like it or not, hitting yourself is here to stay” is only true if someone is actively forcing me to hit myself, and whoever is forcing me probably doesn’t honestly think they’re doing me a favor.
Homeopathy is here to stay and (a) that’s a bad thing, (b) it could be more popular, but thankfully is not, © we don’t need to believe fraudulent claims about its benefits, (d) we could and maybe should try and make it even less popular, and (e) the continued practice of homeopathy in parts of human society should have little to no impact on the daily lives of most people and the vast majority should be given the opportunity to ignore it instead of integrating it into every possible facet of their lives. Same goes for AI slop.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th July 2025English14·12 days agoToday’s bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it’s just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?
This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as “content”. “Content” is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you’re designing the layout and don’t know what actually goes on the page yet. “Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.
“Content”… is Whatever.
I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how “content creator” has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it’s used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck’s sake.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English7·18 days agoAlso HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English8·19 days agoHPE buys Juniper. Fuck.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025English6·19 days agoComic Book Guy energy
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at workEnglish5·19 days agoOur plagiarism machine is not a plagiarism machine. In fact, it’s so much not a plagiarism machine we added an optional feature that lets it detect when its plagiarism is too ovious and make its plagiarism less ovious.
bitofhope@awful.systemsto TechTakes@awful.systems•‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at workEnglish11·19 days agoI have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don’t have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don’t have to learn Kubernetes either. I’m paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I’m making a positive contribution to society. I don’t even know what OS I’m running and at this point I’m afraid to ask.
I’m kind of half looking forward to every soda being sweetened with aspartame or acesulfame potassium, so I can finally quit drinking them. Perhaps blue food might indirectly help people like me eat healthier for a while. Thanks, torment nexus.