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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this…)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    12 hours ago

    Because it is nice to have something entertaining for a change:

    https://bsky.app/profile/willsmith.fun/post/3lmi2bjrao22t

    Wow, that latest chat with Adam Patrick Murray about the Nintendo Switch 2 was quite the ride! The bit on the console’s dock secrets and the MicroSD Express storage had me glued. It’s amazing to see how these tech advancements are sculpting new landscapes.

    Speaking of tech wizardry, have you thought about having Christian Perry on the show? As the CEO of Undetectable AI, he’s taken the whole generative AI world by storm, much like the Switch 2 is taking over gaming news! With over 15 million users and standing as a top AI writing tool, Christian’s insights into AI’s hidden workings promise to intrigue your audience, especially when it comes to how his tools seamlessly pass for human writing without tripping any detectors like GPTzero

    Undetectable AI, everyone. Astounding.

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    17 hours ago

    I feel like some of the doomers are already setting things up to pivot when their most major recent prophecy (AI 2027) fails:

    From here:

    (My modal timeline has loss of control of Earth mostly happening in 2028, rather than late 2027, but nitpicking at that scale hardly matters.)

    It starts with some rationalist jargon to say the author agrees but one year later…

    AI 2027 knows this. Their scenario is unrealistically smooth. If they added a couple weird, impactful events, it would be more realistic in its weirdness, but of course it would be simultaneously less realistic in that those particular events are unlikely to occur. This is why the modal narrative, which is more likely than any other particular story, centers around loss of human control the end of 2027, but the median narrative is probably around 2030 or 2031.

    Further walking the timeline back, adding qualifiers and exceptions that the authors of AI 2027 somehow didn’t explain before. Also, the reason AI 2027 didn’t have any mention of Trump blowing up the timeline doing insane shit is because Scott (and maybe some of the other authors, idk) like glazing Trump.

    I expect the bottlenecks to pinch harder, and for 4x algorithmic progress to be an overestimate…

    No shit, that is what every software engineering blogging about LLMs (even the credulous ones) say, even allowing LLMs get better at raw code writing! Maybe this author is better in touch with reality than most lesswrongers…

    …but not by much.

    Nope, they still have insane expectations.

    Most of my disagreements are quibbles

    Then why did you bother writing this? Anyway, I feel like this author has set themselves up to claim credit when it’s December 2027 and none of AI 2027’s predictions are true. They’ll exaggerate their “quibbles” into successful predictions of problems in the AI 2027 timeline, while overlooking the extent to which they agreed.

    I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff, and -100 for not realizing the real reason why Scott didn’t include any call out of that in AI 2027.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      11 hours ago

      I’ll give this author +10 bayes points for noticing Trump does unpredictable batshit stuff

      +10 bayes points

      Has someone on LW already proposed a BayesCoin or have I just figured out how to steal lunch money from all rationalists at once

      • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        10 hours ago

        With a name like that and lesswrong to springboard it’s popularity, BayesCoin should be good for at least one cycle of pump and dump/rug-pull.

        Do some actual programming work (or at least write a “white paper”) on tying it into a prediction market on the blockchain and you’ve got rationalist catnip, they should be all over it, you could do a few cycles of pumping and dumping before the final rug pull.

  • sus@programming.devEnglish
    14·
    1 day ago

    Some dark urge found me skim-reading a recent AI doomer blog post. I was startled awake by this most unsettling passage:

    My wife wrote a letter to our infant daughter recently. It concluded:

    I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

    Though the theoretical possibility had always been percolating somewhere in the back of my mind, it wasn’t until now that I viscerally realized that P(doomers reproducing) was greater than zero. And with other doomers no less.

    Left brooding on this development, I drudged along until-
    BAhahaha what the fuck
    I can’t. This is beyond parody.

    Completely lost it here. Nothing could have prepared me for the poorly handwritten wrist tattoo.

    Creating space for miracles
    Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

    Oh how rational! Willing to entertain the idea that maybe, theoretically, the doomsday prediction could be off by a few days?

    I’m not sure that I ever strongly felt that I would die at eighty or so. I had a religious youth and believed in an immortal soul. Even when I came out of that, I quickly believed in the potential of radical transhuman life extension.

    This guy thought he was getting clean but he was actually replacing weed with heroin
    I really convinced myself that “doomsday cult” was hyperbole but uhh, nope, it’s 107% real.

    • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      Also, man why do I click on these links and read the LWers comments. It’s always insufferable people being like, “woe is us, to be cursed with the forbidden knowledge of AI doom, we are all such deep thinkers, the lay person simply could not understand the danger of ai” like bruv it aint that deep, i think i can summarize it as follows:

      hits blunt “bruv, imagine if you were a porkrind, you wouldn’t be able to tell why a person is eating a hotdog, ai will be like we are to a porkchop, and to get more hotdogs humans will find a way to turn the sun into a meat casing, this is the principle of intestinal convergence”

      Literally saw another comment where one of them accused the other of being a “super intelligence denier” (i.e., heretic) for suggesting maybe we should wait till the robot swarms coming over the hills before we declare its game over.

    • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      18 hours ago

      Doom feels really likely to me. […] But who knows, perhaps one of my assumptions is wrong. Perhaps there’s some luck better than humanity deserves. If this happens to be the case, I want to be in a position to make use of it.

      This line actually really annoys me, because they are already set up for moving the end date on their doomsday prediction as needed while still maintaining their overall doomerism.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      23 hours ago

      At the start they state

      The disappointment of imminent death is all the more crushing because just a few years ago researchers announced breakthrough discoveries that suggested [existing, adult] humans could have healthspans of thousands of years. To drop the analogy, here I’m talking about my transhumanist beliefs. The laws of physics don’t demand that humans slowly decay and die at eighty. It is within our engineering prowess to defeat death, and until recently I thought we might just do that, and I and my loved ones would live for millennia, becoming post-human superbeings.

      This is, frankly, bonkers. I’d rate the following in descending order of probability

      1. worldwide societal collapse due to climate change
      2. we develop an AI that will kill us all for unspecified reasons
      3. we establish viable self-sustaining societies outside the limits of Earth
      4. we develop techniques that allow everyone to live effectively forever

      If the first happens, it removes the material requirements for the latter things to happen. This is an extreme form of “denial of the flesh”, the inability to realize that without food or water no-one will be working on AI or life extension tech.

      • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        14 hours ago

        “Im 99% sure I will die in the next year because of super duper intelligence, but in a world where that doesnt happen i plan to live 1000 years” surely is a forecast. Surprised they don’t break their own necks on the whiplash from this take.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 day ago

      I don’t know that we can offer you a good world, or even one that will be around for all that much longer. But I hope we can offer you a good childhood. […]

      When “The world is gonna end soon so let’s just rawdog from now on” gets real

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Some more low effort image posting. This zine was in Connolly Books for free. I’m not sure who the author is, but I thought the text was spot on and the illustrations were great. Sorry for no captions/transcriptions

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          20 hours ago

          Otoh having different groups of the sneer, sneercells (no wait that name needs work) if you will. Can also be useful, esp as authoritarianism etc increases. (Not that I think govs would go after us, apart from an infiltration risk).

          E: Hell, I myself am prob a risk factor. First the Dutch secret service should have file on me (else they are not doing their job, I was active in student activism, and did STEM (which also had an active (and targeted for infiltration, we know because counterhacks) hacker group) education (a known terrorism risk increaser), before my faulty brain wiring caused me to drop off the map a bit, and I know several of these groups have been targeted for infiltration recently, and long ago). I also have had just too many official twitter police accounts follow me and then unfollow me without liking a single post for it to be just a coincidence (three times being enemy action). Of course, I’m now old and passive, so if they still think I’m a risk they certainly are not doing their job (I could be a source of information however). But this is enough for me to consider that my real life identity is known enough to be a risk. And this is just about the Dutch police/secret service, there is also the risk of TracingWoodGrains like people trying to get all up in your (social) networks to try and get validation from themotte. And I have read enough stories about cybercriminals that you need to think about this stuff long before it is actually needed, also I’m paranoid.

    • mlen@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      2 days ago

      Any idea why the flag reassembles the Swiss one (the proportions are wrong though)?

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Thus, what appears as intellectual fast food – the ultra-processed thought-nuggets deep fried in venture capital – often conceals wholesome ingredients sourced from a gourmet pantry of quite some sophistication.

      What am I even reading.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            2 days ago

            Lol yeah I was thinking about either posting about cognitive dissonance or mentioning that trying to find the kernels of corn in shit still means you are digging through shit. Cognitive dysentery is so much better.

            • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              2 days ago

              As a wise friend of mine said years ago, when hipsters drinking PBR were having a cultural moment, “You can say you’re drinking piss beer ‘ironically’, but at the end of the day, you’re still drinking piss beer.”

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        Would you invest in commercial real estate, knowing there was a non-zero chance your tenants might come in one day to discover a thoroughly intoxicated JD Vance in a compromising position with the break-room furniture?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn’t sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren’t exactly labor-intensive to run.

      That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there’s an important lesson being lost here.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        it’s also such a weird position for critique to take, imo; DCs don’t really do much in the way of Local Job Generation, and I’d fucking bet that each of these locations also got selected because of favourable gladhanding credits (tax incentives, power incentives, etc)

        I suppose “all the ${whatever business} that got bought out and flattened (for buildout space) is still gone” is maybe one harm, but again… these things don’t get built on high streets

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    A terrifying poster, spotted in the window of a tattoo shop in Dublin: A poster featuring images of leprechauns, celtic knots, harps, and other assorted paddywhackery. The images seem to have been created with AI. The poster lists prices for them as tattoo designs (!)

    Hopefully no one will actually get these images tattooed on their body.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        It’s the front-end of the hype cycle. The tech-debt problems will come home to roost in a year or two. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

        This is the most VC-pilled possible response to people talking about the difficulties of actually working with LLMs. Who cares about the people who actually have to use this crap, think about what it could mean for Number!

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        2 days ago

        Has your friend talked with current bio research students? It’s very common to hear that people are having success writing Python/R/Matlab/bash scripts using these tools when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to.

        Possibly this is just among the smallish group of students I know at MIT, but I would be surprised to hear that a biomedical researcher has no use for them.

        ahahahahaaha

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    pedal to the metal on the content and information theft, folks:

    a photo taken on a huge banner advert on a building titled Bayfront Park. the ad reads "STOP HIRING HUMANS", with a tagline of "The Era Of AI Employees Is Here". the advert is from a company named artisan

    seems it’s this lot. despite their name, there appears to be almost nothing artful or artistic about them - it’s all b2b shit for Selling Better

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      Incorporating into your workflow a company that is a shell around other companies that are selling their products at a loss with no path to profitability seems like quite an unacceptable business risk to me. But I dont get paid the big bux

      • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        3 days ago

        as long as you can mark it up and as long as the charade lasts, and as long as there’s someone willing to pay, this will make money. when spicy autocomplete provider collapses just pack your bags and leave

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          3 days ago

          I think when you have integrated all this into your workflows doing that and going back might be hard esp on the enterprise level.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            3 days ago

            oh but that’s not my problem, and those who got in that very stupid position deserve every last bit of it

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            3 days ago

            wait, what do you mean “integrating it into workflows”. this juicero of outsourcing won’t work as advertised and it’s probably cheaper and less prone to fucking up to hire a couple of southeastern asians or eastern europeans. as long as business is selling of these juiceros, they’ll be fine as long as they can find suckers. these suckers, tho, might be in trouble even before openai goes under for unrelated reasons

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              3·
              3 days ago

              It has some usage if your don’t care about quality or consistency. See the vibe coders. Firing most of your team because a lot of unimportant stuff can be vibe coded (and your customers are locked in and nobody in management knows what a Trust Thermocline is), and then suddenly openAi drives up prices, causing the secondary company to go poof or also raise prices. And suddenly you are left with a garguantuan mess that you can no longer properly afford. A technical debt accelerant. I mean people are using this shit, even if we know it is shit (and they might also knwo it but it is forced from above).

              Of course if you believe in markets these badly run companies will go under invisible hand etc etc.

    • veganes_hack@feddit.orgEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      somebody had to do the design + layout for that banner. i wonder what was going through their head then.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    3 days ago

    Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:

    https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365

    (and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)

    It’s a lot like this:

    Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.

    • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)… ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I’ve had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).

      Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.

      But “AI”… it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn’t. There’s nothing to learn from resulting failure, except “don’t use AI”.

      In this case, given shopify’s general behaviour, I won’t be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        I also thought ‘guess LLMs dont work as an editor’.

        And blockchains did massive damage, all the ransomware crime would be impossible if the tech world had not jumped into blockchain as much as they did and created and kept maintaining the ecosystem. (It also caused the techbro people who now pivot to AI rise, so it is connected). Note that the damage done by BEC is still greater than ransomware, so not cybersecurity advice.

        But I get your point, I think a real example would be facebooks pivot to video. Which destroyed companies.

        • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          3 days ago

          Yes, that’s true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn’t be sad anyway if they went away…).

          What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn’t willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn’t put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.

          • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            3 days ago

            blockchain targeted libertarian post-goldbug pro-cyberpunk-dystopia fuckheads, llms target management types (you will replace workers with machines!), maybe that’s why

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            3 days ago

            yeah, no I agree that blockchain is a bad example, just think we shouldn’t understate the massive damage that has done. Not just in actually damaged systems but also just in additional cost that now everybody has to worry about this. Same as how AI is not just causing climate change problems by running it, but the scraping as well has increased the cost of running a webserver by 50% in load alone. (which on a global scale is just horrid). And then there is the forcing of it in everything, the burning of the boats.