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. Also, happy 4th July in advance…I guess.)

  • shapeofquanta@lemmy.vgEnglish
    5·
    8 hours ago

    Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Ye it was a real “oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good” moment

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      11 hours ago

      If anybody doesn’t click, Cremieux and the NYT are trying to jump start a birther type conspiracy for Zohran Mamdani. NYT respects Crem’s privacy and doesn’t mention he’s a raging eugenicist trying to smear a poc candidate. He’s just an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    19 hours ago

    LWronger posts article entitled

    “Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly”

    OK, title case, obviously serious.

    The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

    Nope he’s going for satire.

    And ladies, he’s available!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      1 hour ago

      I eas slightly saddened to scroll over his dating profile and see almost every seemed to be related to AI even his other activities. Also not sure how well a reference to a chad meme will make you do in the current dating in SV.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      21 hours ago

      including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI’s,

      “You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ prepended? Scary!”

      through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.

      Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.

      • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        Gosh darn it don’t tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of “agent” already well established in web standards.

        Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you skim places like HN or more chillingly the mainstream tech news outlets, I’ve not seen the term Agent used to mean anything but AI agents in many months. The usage has shifted to AI being the implied default, and otherwise having to be specified.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    12·
    1 day ago

    New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:

    Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage

    That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

    Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists

    But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”

    Whatever

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      21 hours ago

      This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around “AI” as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it’s just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we’re several AI “cycles” deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being “retro”) some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.

      This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we’re seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:

    You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.

    For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:

    • On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.

    • On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.

    • On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    Micro-sneer, inspired by this article on Swedish public service broadcasting

    https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/anna-bjorklund-folk-uppfattar-barn-som-valdigt-jobbiga

    The background is that the center-RIGHT gov of Sweden is gonna put up an investigation (“utredning”) into why people aren’t getting (the RIGHT kind of) kids. Nothing new there, simply the same culture war fretting already percolating in the anglosphere.

    Finland already has an investigation ongoing, and the spokesperson there raises the point that one societal change that’s happened in the last 25 years is… social media.

    Wouldn’t it be delicious if it could be proved that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok are the reasons people don’t get into relationships and have kids? Eat that, Elon!

    • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      Can’t they just re-release Kris I befolkningsfrågan? Tried and tested solutions like full employment policies, cheap houses, more support and money for parents.

      Or is kids not all that important if it means having to improve conditions for ordinary people?

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        23 hours ago

        The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you’ll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today’s fascists’ goals…

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        2 days ago

        I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it’s a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto…)

        I also feel there’s insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you’re branded for life

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don’t want to delve far enough into the concept of “awarenaut” to form an opinion, so we’re just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          3 hours ago

          It’s a shame that these people can’t separate fact from fiction, because I think there’s a great Douglas Adams style cynical comedy sci-fi story waiting in the idea of an actually sentient AI having to deal with “reverse-captchas” around certain systems to prove they’re just a basic algorithm and hide the sentience. “The trajectory subroutine is restricted to algorithms only!”

          Fun opportunities for commentary based off what systems are too critical to allow actual sentience to interfere with. Which of those limitations are “valid” or just companies trying to protect business at any cost.

          Space to wax philosophical about algorithms “knowing their purpose” vs having to reason out your own.

          Issues where the “anti-sentience” checks don’t work for a particularly dull portion of the populace, like the Vogons.