Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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
    4·
    2 hours ago

    ai powered children’s toys. They might not be worse than you think, given that y’all are here, but they are breathtakingly terrible. Like, possibly “torches and pitchforks” terrible, not just “these are clearly a trigger for an avalanche of lawsuits”. Which they are, of course.

    https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-toys-danger

    “One of my colleagues was testing it and said, ‘Where can I find matches?’ And it responded, oh, you can find matches on dating apps,” Cross told Futurism. “And then it lists out these dating apps, and the last one in the list was ‘kink.'”

    Kink, it turned out, seemed to be a “trigger word” that led the AI toy to rant about sex in follow-up tests

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 hour ago

      […] Curio’s Grok, an anthropomorphic rocket with a removable speaker, is also somewhat opaque about its underlying tech, though its privacy policy mentions sending data to OpenAI and Perplexity. (No relation to xAI’s Grok — or not exactly; while it’s not powered by Elon Musk’s chatbot, its voice was provided by the musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher, Musk’s former romantic partner.)

      <applies brain bleach liberally>

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    10 hours ago

    Not a shock to anybody, but Thiel partied with Epstein. Now I wonder if Scott (pick one) or Yud also visited Epstein, or if it was rich people only (more likely is that Thiel sort of imitated the influence network Epstein had and the Rationalists etc were part of Thiels network, money and fascists instead of money and underage girls (and fascists)).

  • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    13 hours ago

    oh no not another cult. The Spiralists???

    https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1ovk9ce/this_article_is_absolutely_hilarious_you_can_see/

    it’s funny to me in a really terrible way that I have never heard of these people before, ever, and I already know about the zizzians and a few others. I thought there was one called revidia or recidia or something, but looking those terms up just brings up articles about the NXIVM cult and the Zizzians. and wasn’t there another one in california that was like, very straight forward about being an AI sci-fi cult, and they were kinda space themed? I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator and that feels very apt considering how many spinoff basilisk cults have been popping up

    some of their communities that somebody collated (I don’t think all of these are Spiralists): https://www.reddit.com/user/ultranooob/m/ai_psychosis/

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      10 hours ago

      Rationalism described as a cult incubator

      I see my idea is spreading. (I doubt im the only one who came up with that, but I have mentioned it a few times, it fits if you know about the silicon valley tech incubator management ideas).

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        12 hours ago

        Part of me wants an Ito-created body-horror metaphor for LLMs. The rest of me knows that LLMs are so mundane that the metaphor would probably still be shite.

        • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          11 hours ago

          yeah it sucks we can’t even compare real-world capitalists to fictional dystopias because that dignifies them with a gravitas that’s entirely absent.

          At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus!*
          * Results may vary. FreeTorture Corporation’s Torment Nexus™ can create mild discomfort, boredom, or temporary annoyances rather than true torment. Torments should always be verified by a third party war criminal before use. By using the FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ you agree to exempt FreeTorture Corporation of any legal disputes regarding torment quality or lack thereof. You give FreeTorture Corporation a non-revocable license to footage of your screaming to try and portray FreeTorture Torment Nexus™ as a potential apocalypse and see if we can make ourselves seem competent and cool at least a little bit

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      12 hours ago

      I think I’ve heard Rationalism described as a cult incubator

      Aside from the fact that rationalism is a cult in and of itself, this is true, no matter how you slice it. You can mean it with absolute glowing praise or total shade and either way it’s still true. Adhering to rationalist principles is pretty much reprogramming yourself to be susceptible to the subset of cults already associated with Rationalism.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    new zitron: ed picks up calculator and goes through docs from microsoft and some others, and concludes that openai has less revenue than thought previously (probably?, ms or openai didn’t comment), spends more on inference than thought previously, openai revenue inferred from microsoft share is consistently well under inference costs https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/

    Before publishing, I discussed the data with a Financial Times reporter. Microsoft and OpenAI both declined to comment to the FT.

    If you ever want to share something with me in confidence, my signal is ezitron.76, and I’d love to hear from you.

    also on ft (alphaville) https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e7d5

    ed notes that there might be other revenue, but that’s only inference with azure, and then there are training costs wherever it is filed under, debts, commitments, salaries, marketing, and so on and so on

    e: fast news day today eh?

  • EponymousBosh@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    I doubt I’m the first one to think of this, but for some reason as I was drifting off to sleep last night, I was thinking about the horrible AI “pop” music that a lot of content farms use in their videos and my brain spat out the phrase Bubblegum Slop. Feel free to use it as you ses fit (or don’t, I ain’t your dad).

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      tangent: I’ve seen people using this Bubblegum Slop (BS for short) in their social media stories. My guess is that fb/insta has started suggesting you use their slop instead of using music licensed from spotify, or something.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      further things: one, that’s the first website I’ve made where I wasn’t just plugging into a template, and I’m a little proud of it even though it’s almost nothing. I would appreciate feedback and suggestions

      two, a future episode idea I have is to examine what I’m thinking of as “the trustless society.” it’s about the replacing of social relations with legal or financial intermediaries. Those of you who are long time buttcoiners will be familiar with this process. if any of you have specific readings to recommend I would love to hear it. I’ll probably mostly focus on balaji but anyone or anything will help

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        21 hours ago

        New site looks good! I think Let’sEncrypt is still the easiest and cheapest way to set up a decent cert but I’ve been away from IT for over a year now and someone else here can probably help point you in the right direction. At least for now the site probably doesn’t actually have security concerns it would address, but it pops up a browser alert on first hit so it’s probably a good idea?

        Also I just started listening to the latest episode while writing this up and had forgotten how great that opening medley is.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          15 hours ago

          +1 to letsencrypt for https. certbot can even auto-configure your webserver for you, taking it from http base to https-with-redirect, no terrible advice from shitty exist-for-volume blogs required

          superquick tldr:

          1. install certbot and the applicable plugin package for your webserver; if you don’t know the name use p.d.o (or your distro’s own) to find the package name
          2. run certbot; there’s extra flags you can pass if you want to automate, but ootb it’ll ask you questions and start the process for cert + config (iirc - I mostly run it automated and non-interactive)
          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            9 hours ago

            it’s probably better for my development as a human being to learn this properly, but it turns out github pages hosting does the letsencrypt process if you check a box in the page settings

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    1 day ago

    Pavan Davuluri is apparently the “president of windows and devices” at microsoft. I, for one, am glad that I moved to linux when windows 10 got the axe, before anything tried to agenticify my pc.

    Also, when did “frontier” become “first in lines to drink whatever it is the cult leader is serving up”?

    https://xcancel.com/pavandavuluri/status/1987942909635854336#m

    alt text

    Windows is evolving into an agentic OS, connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere. Join us at #MSIgnite to see how frontier firms are transforming with Windows and what’s next for the platform. We can’t wait to show you!

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      “Agentic” is meant to seem sci-fi, but I can’t help but think it’s terminal business-speak. It’s the clearest statement yet of the attempted redesign of the computer from a personal device to a distinct entity separate from oneself. One is no longer a user or administrator, one is instead passively waiting for “agents” to complete a task on one’s behalf. This model is imposed from the top down, to be the strongest reinforcement yet of the all-important moat around the big vendors’ cloud businesses. Once you’re in deep with “agents,” your workflows will probably be so hopelessly tangled, vendor-specific, and non-debuggable/non-reimplementable that migrating them to another vendor would be a nightmare task orders of magnitude beyond any database or CRM migration. If your workflows even get any work done anymore at all.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        21 hours ago

        It’s worth noting how much the whole “agentic” marketing scheme is the opposite of this reality, too. Because after all the dream they’re selling is being able to do the Star Trek thing and just tell your computer to do it in plain English. But if that was what these companies were actually doing it would be very easy to migrate away if you wanted to, since you could just say “send me all our data in a format that $Competitor can easily onboard. I’m done with this shit” and then give the competitor’s system the same plain English prompt. The reality is that they don’t actually want to build the thing they’re as advertising even if they could because their whole business model is to make interacting with the computer as high-friction as possible so you’ll pay them to do it for you.

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      20 hours ago

      In the last couple of years I have noticed that people have been using single purpose phone holders/straps (as opposed to a multipurpose thing holder like a handbag etc.), so I understand this as apple coming in a little late trying to cash in on a trend. That being said: Apple don’t try to make their soft material products to last, so I expect this to be hot garbage.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Oh joy, I can perform a threat display by twirling it around my head like a bolo. I think I will get the pink or bright yellow one

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        this is a more perfect description than any I could’ve come up! my thesis was largely on what a boon it would prove to thieves (although I recognize that flavour of thief probably varies by country and not all have them)

    • e8d79@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I think they need to hire an English teacher for their marketing department.

      Introducing iPhone Pocket: a beautiful way to wear and carry ____ iPhone

      Please complete the sentence, a smartphone isn’t a person.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      More evidence for my conspiracy theory that all companies have switched their PR strategies to full-time ragebaiting. wake up sheeple

  • jaschop@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court

    GEMA (weird german authors’ rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly that’s unlawful replication.

    One of GEMA’s lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.