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)

17 points

Follow up for this post from the other day.

Our DSO now greenlit the stupid Copilot integration because “Microsoft said it’s okay” (of course they did), and he also was on some stupid AI convention yesterday and whatever fucking happened there, he’s become a complete AI bro and is now preaching the Gospel of Altman that everyone who’s not using AI will be obsolete in few years and we need to ADAPT OR DIE. It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT even though just a week ago he was hating on people who did that. I sat with my fucking mouth open in that meeting and people asked me whether I’m okay (I’m not).

I need to get another job ASAP or I will go clinically insane.

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11 points

I’m so sorry. the tech industry is shockingly good at finding people who are susceptible to conversion like your CEO and DSO and subjecting them to intense propaganda that unfortunately tends to work. for someone lower in the company like your DSO, that’s a conference where they’ll be subjected to induction techniques cribbed from cults and MLM schemes. I don’t know what they do to the executives — I imagine it involves a variety of expensive favors, high levels of intoxication, and a variant of the same techniques yud used — but it works instantly and produces someone who can’t be convinced they’ve been fed a lie until it ends up indisputably losing them a ton of money

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8 points

Yeah, I assume that’s exactly what happened when CEO went to Silicon Valley to talk to “important people”. Despite being on a course to save money before, he dumped tens of thousands into AI infrastructure which hasn’t delivered anything so far and is suddenly very happy with sending people to AI workshops and conferences.

But I’m only half-surprised. He’s somewhat known for making weird decisions after talking to people who want to sell him something. This time it’s gonna be totally different, of course.

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9 points

The “important people” line is a huge part of how the grift works and makes tech media partially responsible. Legitimizing the grift rather than criticizing it makes it easy for sales folks to push “the next big thing.” And after all, don’t you want to be an important person?

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11 points
*

He wants an AI that handles data security breaches by itself. He also now writes emails with ChatGPT

He is the data security breach.

E: Dropped a T. But hey, at least chatgpt uses SSL to communicate, so the databreach is now constrained to the ChatGPT trainingdata. So it isn’t that bad.

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8 points

It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a “I guess this is what we have to work on” way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.

Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.

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5 points
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Ugh, I’m sorry man. That’s awful.

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12 points
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What are the chances that–somewhere deep in the bowels of Clearwater, FL–some poor soul has been ordered to develop an AI replicant of L. Ron Hubbard?

There is a substantial corpus.

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7 points

How would you audit a computer? Would they add USB-C ports to the cans?

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6 points

cat /dev/thetans > ~/genius.txt

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5 points

pours a bag of powdered mdma all over the computer “look at it! it’s drenched in e! PURGE!”

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4 points

They’ve had enough problems with the guy who claimed to be the reincarnation of LRH.

I reckon Miscavige wouldn’t want a robo-LRH as it could challenge his power within the organization.

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6 points

Doesn’t have his body tethans so would be a different person or something.

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12 points

the only worthwhile use of LLMs: endlessly prompting the L Ron Hubbard chatbot with Battlefield Earth reviews as a form of acausal torture

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10 points

look at me i am the basilisk now

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13 points
11 points
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so according to @liveuamap, the backstory here is that this is to get his name out of news about the WildBerries shooting in Moscow - where a battle for corporate control came down to gunshots - because he was backing one of the sides

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12 points
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The robots clearly want us dead – “Delivery Robot Knocked Over Pedestrian, Company Offered ‘Promo Codes’ to Apologize” (404 media) (archive)

And here rationalists warned that AI misalignment would be hidden from us until the “diamonoid bacteria”.

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7 points

AI misalignment leads to spinal misalignment.

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11 points

If only we had paid attention to the roomba hitting us in the leg. It wasn’t adorable, it was a murder attempt!

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5 points

This reminded me of that prediction I made w.r.t the “AI Doom” criti-hype (and touched on after SB 1047 popped up) back when OpenAI was gunning (heh) for DoD dollars.

Personally, I suspect that this might provide another case of “AI doom” becoming a double-edged sword for the AI industry. What can be dismissed as a simple error on their products’ parts gets potentially a lot more problematic to deal with when a vocal minority is primed to find malice where none exists.

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12 points

I literally just saw a xitter post about how the exploding pagers in Lebanon is actually a microcosm of how a ‘smarter’ entity (the yahood) can attack a ‘dumber’ entity, much like how AGI will unleash the diamond bacterium to simultaneously kill all of humanity.

Which again, both entities are humans- they have the same intelligence you twats. Same argument people make all the time w.r.t. Spanish v Aztecs where gunpowder somehow made Cortez and company gigabrains compared to the lowly indigenous people (and totally ignoring the contributions of the real super intelligent entity: the small pox virus).

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13 points

OK new rule you’re only allowed to call someone dumb for not finding explosives in their pagers if you had, previously to hearing the news, regularly checked with no specialized tools all electronics you buy for bombs hidden inside of the battery compartment.

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9 points

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it’s a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

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8 points
*

first comment is a masterpiece.

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8 points

DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use

full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.

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