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)

25 points
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Kicking off the sack with something light.

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15 points

I see RicksCEO.eth has since quietly removed the “.eth” part of his name. Presumably it was way more embarrassing than being a strip club tycoon.

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14 points

Headcanon: he changed it as a result of this epic bonnie slam

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11 points

it looks like checkmarks retailated

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11 points

unlike Rick, she did get laid

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9 points

some years ago I wanted to build a bot that tracks all these loons, but the twitter API reqs are onerous as fuck so I never bothered

feel like there’s probably still a need for something like that. perhaps even more so than before, given how mask-off the snakepit is getting

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8 points

Considering API access is now I think 40k a month + you pay for usage, prob good you never got into that. So the time doesn’t feel wasted.

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10 points

Godspeed, Bonnie. I’m gonna call this a good omen for the week.

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24 points

eigenrobot:

almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.

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21 points

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

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20 points

Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.

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15 points

Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense

same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose

I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop

this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious

if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions

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14 points

Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.

These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.

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13 points
*

Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.

Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops

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15 points

aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there’s people who don’t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad

lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism

this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they’re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias

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14 points
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Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.

Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?

I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.

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12 points

“socialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsides”

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13 points

Weird way to say he doesn’t talk to many women

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10 points

almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis

Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?

Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?

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10 points

Oh but you see it’s not regressive because it’s polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermensch’s children

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10 points

eigen “Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee” robot

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9 points

Oh, he’s apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197

Knowing the context doesn’t really change anything about this tweet though.

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8 points

I’ve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave

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10 points

eigen “I’ll call it ironic if people call me on my shit” robot

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8 points

why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?

why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?

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7 points
*

Status. Also just a bit of kink and ‘proving’ heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).

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23 points

I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.

Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.

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18 points

i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty

it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you

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10 points

…I feel like there’s a story here.

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15 points

camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.

my current box is the descendant of that one

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3 points

A couple months ago I lobbied for (and won) my weekly trivia team to use the name “mike’s hard lemonparty”

Then I learned exactly how old I was

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19 points
*

Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:

We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.

Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?

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17 points

from someone on Mastodon:

Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.

If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.

I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.

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10 points

I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation

(promotion driven dev)

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10 points

Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.

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8 points

that’s quite appealing to me ngl

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9 points

God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.

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14 points

Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.

Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”

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7 points
*

If the purpose of a metric is to show adoption, the metric can be defined in a way to show adoption. Could be just an effect of promo driven culture, AI push and good’ol Goodhart’s law.

Like, how do you even measure when code is ai authored and when not. If you insert 25% of a variable name and the autocompleter guesses the rest of the name correctly, are the remaining 75% AI generated?

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4 points

appparently this is use of code-complete as well

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7 points

Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.

I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.

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9 points

which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)

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5 points
*

At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.

The reason I think it was a freebie is:

  1. Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
  2. Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
  3. Cyberpunk 2022 2077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch

It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.

Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻‍♂️

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18 points

Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.

The new self-checkout process is as follows:

  1. Scan your item
  2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
  3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
  4. Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
  5. GOTO 1

Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.

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9 points

I call this the law of conservation of complexity

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8 points

sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)

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4 points

I wonder when the management will figure out these rigid anti theft systems cost a lot more than they save.

On that note, think i figured out a way to get free products on the lidl checkout. There was a large amount of errors (some of which caused by me by accident). And required help a couple of times and later i realized that i had paid less than expected. Not sure if it is reproducable, as that would be stealing, or trying to get hired as a red teamer.

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