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.

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

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      4 days ago

      AGI is coming, we’re already at the “dumb guy who doesn’t understand math but thinks he’s smart” level

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        6·
        4 days ago

        Jim Propp once wrote,

        I asked ChatGPT, the modern apotheosis of unjustified self-confidence, to prove that .999… is less than 1. Its reply began “Here is a proof that .999… is less than 1.” It then proceeded to show (using familiar arguments) that .999… is equal to 1, before majestically concluding “But our goal was to show that .999… is less than 1. Hence the proof is complete.” This reply, as an example of brazen mathematical non sequitur, can scarcely be improved upon.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      5 days ago

      I’ve said it before a few times: this shit is a tunguska-level event on society today

      that there’s now even retroactive contamination fallout is sickening :|

      • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        12·
        5 days ago

        tunguska incident only wiped out local squirrel population and its fallout was inert. this is more like leaded gasoline: introduced for profit, polluting for decades, makes people dumber during entire duration of it, entrenches techbros and makes them responsible for development of infrastructure going forward

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        5 days ago

        Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.

          • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            5 days ago

            As a fan of physical media, I recently bought another drive as a spare, currently is IMO a good time for that. They still make really good drives in large enough quantities so they’re cheap, but that could end any time. Once production stops, they will vanish silently. Learned that lesson back then when floppy drives were suddendly gone… kinda wish I had stocked up a few new ones (for retro computing purposes) when they were still available.

          • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
            10·
            5 days ago

            I’m the weirdo who installs blu-ray drives in all my computers. I’m also the weirdo who has multiple computers. There are currently three or four (I’ve lost count) blu-ray drives in my house.

            It’s great being able to buy and own movies without dealing with the horrors of streaming. Unfortunately discs are becoming less and less popular commercially, so a lot of stuff nowadays is streaming only.

            Also my car can play MP3 CDs so of course I need to be able to create those from a computer disregard the fact that my car also supports USB which I neglect since it’s less retro.

            • BigMuffin69@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              5 days ago

              My father-in-law is a hoarder of both physical and digital things. His house is filled with hard drives where he has like stored copies of every movie ever made as mp4s and then he sends the drives to us because he has no physical space for them since he has junk from like 30 years ago piling up in the living room. So now my house is filled with random ass hard drives of (definitely not pirated) movies.

            • ShakingMyHead@awful.systemsEnglish
              2·
              4 days ago

              Yeah, wanted to get the new seasons of Futurama on bluray as a gift, turns out that they only are on streaming. Of course.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      Oof yeah, that’s rough. The AI generated header image isn’t helping his credibility, either. Didn’t he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?

      The Bally’s story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, they’re also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland A’s in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

    My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

    I couldn’t locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various “tasks” to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

    Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera “device” to record ones every waking moment.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    5 days ago

    so I ran into this fucking garbage earlier, which goes so hard on the constituent parts of “the spam is the point”, an ouroborosian self-reinforcing loop of Just More Media Bro Just One More Video Bro You’ll See Bro It’ll Be The Best Listicle Bro Just Watch Bro, and the insufferably cancerous “the medium is the message” videos-made-for-youtube-because-youtube that if it were a voltron it’d probably have its own unique Special Moment sequence instead of being one of the canned assembly shots

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      6 days ago

      You’d think the AI safety chuds would have more reservations about using GPT, which they believe has sapience, to learn things. They have the concept of an AI being a good convincer, which, hey, idiots, how have none of you thought the great convincing has started? Also, how have none of you realised that maybe you should be a little harder to convince in general???

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        6 days ago

        It is a long-established truth that it’s significantly easier to con someone who thinks they’re smarter than you. Also as I think about it a little bit there seems to be a reasonable corollary of their approach towards Bayesian thinking that you not question anything that matches your expectations, which is exactly how you get taken advantage of by the kind of grifter they’re attached to. Like, they’ve been thinking about the singularity for long enough that the Sams (bankman-fried, Altman, etc) have a well-developed script for what they expect the first stages to look like and it is, as demonstrated, very easy to fake that.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    6 days ago

    I hope everyone is ready for the constant overlap between politics and AI / Silicon Valley; because I’m not.

    Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders (Source Bluesky Thread).

    I’m not 100% sure I buy that the EOs were written by AI rather than people who simply don’t care about or don’t know the details; but it certainly looks possible. Especially that example about the Gulf of Mexico. Either way I am heartened that this is the conclusion people jump to.

    Aside: I also like how much media is starting to cite bluesky (and activitypub to a lesser extent). I assume a bunch of journalists moved off of twitter or went multi-platform.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      6 days ago

      Isn’t this one of the things that LW was spooked by? Giving the reins to an AI? Won’t someone think of the wrongers???

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      Thanks, I hate it.

      Especially because Trump’s legal teams have historically been more than incompetent enough to produce this kind of work on their own.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        5 days ago

        In a way that they have been historically awful and thwarted by the courts is a thing that worries me. I’d expect that somebody the past 8 years went ‘this time we will not be bogged down in that’. But considering they went 100% in on repression from day 1 I’m slightly less worried about that.

        For context, going all in on day 1 is actually bad for them, when the nazis took over The Netherlands/Belgium they methods there differed. In .nl they worked slowly and with gov already there, in .be they went full pogroms a lot faster. This meant that in .be a lot of people saw the threat sooner (WW1 and Belgium prob also didn’t help) and acted and took better care of the vulnerable. The amount of Dutch Jewish people who survived ww2 vs Belgian Jewish people is very tragic. (and a very dark part of our history which we don’t really talk about like this as mentioning that parts of your own country also are to blame for the holocaust is not a thing a lot of people want to talk about). At least I hope that stuff like going all crazy on the bishop will turn out to be big wakeup for random Americans and a strategic mistake on their part, they certainly didn’t seem to have learned from the nazis (at least not this lesson, which fits with how fascism is blind for their own mistakes).

        • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          5 days ago

          I don’t know if this is good news for the underlying risk of how willing the nuts and bolts of society are to resist unlawful or monstrous policies. IDK, on the subject of complicity I think the fact that we eventually joined the war has caused a deep cultural amnesia about how much influence the Reich had on the states and vice versa. Charles Lindbergh, Madison Square Garden, etc. We didn’t really acknowledge how much our cultural and political structures are open to authoritarianism, much less addressing those issues.

  • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    7 days ago

    This is a thought I’ve been entertaining for some time, but this week’s discussion about Ars Technica’s article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.

    A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven’t cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won’t dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It’s gassed. The idea that “it might be ME up there one day!” persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don’t have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.

    For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I’ve seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems… which, if it’s not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.

    Everybody’s looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      5 days ago

      This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.

      Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.

      Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don’t fucking think so.

      We’re unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn’t you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you’re gone? If you can’t spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that’s a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.

      And I don’t think there’s a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      Agree with space travel being retro-futurist fluff. It’s very rich men badly remembering mediocre science fiction.

      The US could lead the world in innovation in green technology but that’s now tainted by wokeness.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      7 days ago

      Hmm, any sort of vision for generating public support for development of a technology has to have either ideological backing or a profit incentive. I don’t say this to mean that the future must be profitable, rather, I say this to mean that you don’t get the space race if western powers aren’t afraid of communism appearing as a viable alternative to capitalism, on both ideological and commercial fronts.

      Unfortunately, a vision of that kind is necessarily technofascist. Rather than look for a tech-forward vision of the future, we need deprogram ourselves and unlearn the unspoken narratives that prop up capitalism and liberal democracy as the only viable forms of society. We need to dismantle the systems and structures that require the complex political buy-in for projects that are clearly good for society at large.

      Uh, I guess I’ve kind of gone completely orthogonal to your point of discussion. I’m kind of saying the collapse of the US is inevitable.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          6 days ago

          ah, am conflating the cold war and the space race. Though, why the nations wanted to develop ICBMs is entirely relevant.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        6 days ago

        On another somewhat orthogonal point, I suspect AI has likely soured the public on any kinda tech-forward vision for the foreseeable future.

        Both directly and indirectly, the AI slop-nami has caused a lot of bad shit for the general public - from plagiarism to misinformation, from shit-tier AI art to screwing human artists, the public has come to view AI as an active blight on society, and use of AI as a virtual “Kick Me” sign.

        • FredFig@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          6 days ago

          I’ve been struggling with what the appropriate level of engagement for all the tech shit is.

          I can stick to making fun of the AI crap and whatever else the tech people shit out because it’s tangible for me, and I can more or less be an effective gatekeeper for my community, but the problems go beyond just a bunch of rich tech weirdos floating bad ideas, it’s what they’re trying to paper over. The fact that they’re incompetent at it is very funny, but I’ve been laughing with gritted teeth for too long.

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        11·
        6 days ago

        For the US to avoid collapse, the Democrats would have to sweep the board in multiple successive elections and be more unified and committed to deep reform than they ever have been.

        I will pause for the laughter to fade.

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          11·
          6 days ago

          In completely related news I’m strongly considering getting my affairs in order and moving anywhere in the entire world besides the united states somewhere in Europe; as it’s apparently no longer safe for trans people or C++ developers* in the US. So if anyone has any advice (or job leads) please do share.

          * This is a memory safety joke

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          12·
          6 days ago

          Snark answer: for the US to avoid collapse, the democrats will have to do literally anything, so yeah collapse is inevitable.

          Optimistic answer: a third, actually leftist, anti-liberal party suddenly gains popularity and power and reforms the US entirely.

          Realistic answer: trump and the republicans will fully construct a fascist chokehold over the US probably by the end of this year at the earliest. Anyone who has any hope in non-violent action is deluding themselves.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        6 days ago

        No actually, I think what you have to say is in line with my broader point. As the top source of global consumer demand, America is primarily held together by its supply chains at this point. To be crude about it, the best reasons to be an American in the 21st century are the swag and the cheap gas. When the MAGA and Fox News crowd are pointing fingers and ranting about Marxism, they’re actively trying to obscure materialism and keep people from thinking about material conditions. Having a material program, that at least has elements that can be built from the bottom up, is at least as crucial as having an electoral program. I know the Four Thieves people got rightfully shredded here a few weeks back, and that kind of technical pushback on amateur dreams is necessary, so it’s a tough needle to thread. But for instance, consider Gavin Newsom’s plan to have California operate its own insulin production, within existing systems and regulations: https://calmatters.org/health/2025/01/insulin-production-gavin-newsom/ This is a Newsom policy I actually think is a fantastic idea, and a big credit to him if it happens! But it’s bogged down in the production-line validation stage, because we already know how to synthesize insulin and that it’s effective. And the production may not even be in California when it happens! There’s plenty of room for improvement here.

        Space and centralized, rent-seeking “AI” are not material programs that improve conditions for the broader population. The original space program was successful because a more tightly controlled media environment gave the opportunity to use it to cover for the missile development that was the enduring practical outcome. Positive consumer outcomes from all that have always felt, to me, like something that was bolted onto the history later. We wouldn’t have Tang and transistors if not for Apollo! Well, one is kind of shitty and useless, the other is so overwhelmingly advantageous that it surely would have happened anyway.

        And to your last point, I somewhat sadly feel like a lot of doomer shit I was reading ~15 years ago actually prepared me to at least be unsurprised about the situation we’re in. A lot of those writers (James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer for instance) have either softly capitulated, or else happily slotted themselves into the middle of the red-brown alliance. I think that’s a big part of why we’re at where we’re at: a lot of people who were actually willing to consider the idea of American collapse were perfectly fine with letting it happen.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    6 days ago

    d’ya think this post on awful.systems, the lemmy instance (which is known as awful.systems), is the location of this awful.systems thread? let me hear your thoughts, awful.systems

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      10 days ago

      I recall seeing something of this sort happening on goog for about 12~18mo - every so often a researcher post does the rounds where someone finds Yet Another way goog is fucking it up

      the advertising dept has completely captured all mindshare and it is (demonstrably) the only part that goog-the-business cares about

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    9 days ago

    CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It’s a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called “LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL”

    I didn’t have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy

    We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.

    (Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)

    Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.

    I’d also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate “DATABASES AND ML” session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.