this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd November 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

(page 2) 50 comments

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 14 points 1 month ago (16 children)

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.

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 13 points 1 month ago (7 children)

in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago

that was always allowed.png

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Robinhood's about to make a whole new generation of apes:

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (13 children)

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

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/

can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

that article misses one of the delicious parts of that story: they called saltman a “podcast bro” in derision

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as "foundries" for chip manufacturing.

Oh man, that's a delicious understatement. If the allegations are true, this was a plan that would make the military-industrial complex envious.

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

FastCompany: "In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots"

It's interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need "Apple Intelligence"[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous "Crush" AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday... I find it just alienating.

Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can't find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don't think anyone can.

[1] I'd like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it "iSlop"

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

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) ? 🤔

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (7 children)

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

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[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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/

[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 1 month ago (7 children)

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

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[–] maol@awful.systems 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

The AI lawsuit's going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:

[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Is there a group that more consistently makes category errors than computer scientists? Can we mandate Philosophy 101 as a pre-req to shitting out research papers?

Edit: maybe I need to take a break from Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Quick update - Brian Merchant's list of "luddite horror" films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:

To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume "luddite horror" is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we're gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble's produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public's gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Olivia Squizzle followup: AI Replacement | Drawing Your Requests

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago (3 children)

ZITRON DROPPED

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 1 month ago

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.

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