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.)

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    So I got jumpscared recently by that couple. I was listening to one of my many favourite podcasts, Threedom, when on the most recent episode, “I Definitely Tuned Out and I Agree With You”, this exchange happened, starting around 44 minutes, give or take 10 for ads.

    spoiler tagged exchange, in case you are a pisspig* and don't want spoilers.

    Context: the hosts are talking about how they value fostering their children’s expressive abilities, even if that means their children do things like scream in inappropriate situations.

    Scott: I guess what I’m trying to say is that some parents would look at us, and say, like, “oh, you’re not teaching them how to act in social situations or whatever,”

    Paul: Yes, you should slap them across the face, in the store.

    <laughter>

    Scott: Who was that… that… that, like, person who… there’s some parent out there that thinks that you need to like have a million kids or whatever and uh, and a paper writer followed them around and he just smacked his kid right in front of the paper writ-, er… the journalist? Uh, anyway…

    Lauren: Paper writer?

    Scott: Yeah, sorry, sorry, Journalist.

    Paul: Couldn’t sound more specific, and yet I don’t know.

    <end of reference>

    Tried too hard transcribing this and still feel like I did a bad job.

    Anyway, gosh, congrats to them on their extreme success in being platformed. Couldn’t have been a more deserving couple. /s

    *pisspig is the name given to a fan of the podcast Threedom. The fans picked the name, the hosts aren’t really sure why.

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    back on my posting sorta off topic shit: well, we’ve talked a bit about anti-academia nutters, so here’s a developing story about (western) academia having a normal one.

    Headline: Oxford’s Rafflesia Messaging Sparks Debate Over Representation, Scientific Credit, and Global South Visibility

    My summary: in an announcement, oxford performs erasure by only really naming researchers from oxford amongst a team where most of the contributions were from southeast asian researchers.

    Pastor Malabrigo Jr. and Adriane B. Tobias are listed as the first and second authors, while other authors are from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Bogor Botanical Gardens, University of Bengkulu, and Forest Research Institute Malaysia. The Author Contributions section also shows that Southeast Asian researchers wrote most of the country-specific content, compiled distribution data, and produced scientific figures. Yet none of these appear in the Oxford press release as scientific authorities.

    This article is by “scientific watchdog” with a “.id” domain, which is Indonesian. Seems a little bespoke for the article, but, hey, all the facts are verifiable.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      I’m going to laugh if they try to spin it as “we’re not being racist, we just wanted to get as much institutional clout as possible and avoided prominently featuringanyone from other institutions!”

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Semi-relevant, Matthew Garrett has won a court case against the kooks running Techrights:

    https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115581959497817474

    About the only positive thing you can say about Schestowitz (and probably his wife) is that they are rabidly anti-AI, but that is only because they are also rabidly against anyone who does not subscribe to their personal purity-test vision of Free Software (basically it’s them, RMS, and maybe his parrot).

    I have an unhealthy interest in them, because during the Andrew Lee putsch they were basically on his side, until he fucked even them, and I kinda drifted into their IRC server to see what was up. It was my unwelcome introduction to the toxic underbelly of FLOSS, with rampant RMS-worship, misogyny, racism and incipient techno-fascism. I ducked out quite quickly.

    Tellingly, Techrights is all in on the Gemini protocol.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      FFS so many promptfondlers and gish-gallopers in there. Echoes of pro-crapto (can’t criticize if you don’t buy in, use case is coming bro, it’s actually decentralized)

      Edit the worst thing isnt’t the number of fondlers, it’s the upvotes they’re getting.

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        That he’s being sponsored by DeleteMe is oddly fitting in its own right. Were it not for surveillance capitalism relentlessly stealing personal data and invading people’s privacy, its services would be completely unnecessary.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        And all of this over a local 1% speed increase. Which he imagines just works just as well for everyone else. (I noted the Rationalism style, calculate this minor increase over all potential (imagined) users to make it into a big thing bit as well).

        And his source for the increase? He played two games. (One of which was cyberpunk, which iirc can be weird re gpu optimizations, so it isn’t even a reliable indication).

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      the obnoxious self-aggrandizement is dripping all over the text, not the least of which when he conceptualizes himself as a part of a “new and potentially valuable class of contributors”, as if the addition of a slop-generator can transform the layperson into someone capable of contributing to a complex software project. but that’s old news. here’s what’s getting me now:

      For a project like Mesa, which uses the permissive MIT license, accidentally incorporating a snippet of code that carries the “viral” obligations of the GPL could potentially trigger a legal catastrophe. Faith Ekstrand drove this point home with a chillingly practical example: “If we piss off Nvidia and they sue us, the project is over. It doesn’t matter whether or not we can theoretically win.”

      this is a legal issue – this should be Seyfarth’s home turf! obviously he can’t code and has a sneering contempt for anyone who learns to do so, but in this micro-instance, giving an informed legal opinion on how this issue could be handled would actually be in the Mesa project’s best interests! let’s see how he

      However this is a hypothetical scenario and there are several ways to mitigate such legal risks. Most projects already shift the legal burden to the contributor. The project still has to reject any code that openly violates the licensing terms, but if such violations are not obvious, there is little legal risk to the project itself.

      “it wouldn’t happen, and even if it did, you could just try to sacrifice your individual developers to NVIDIA one at a time and hope that makes them go away.” great cool thank you. this is the best you’ve got with your legal background. fantastic. what an utter tool

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      JFC, man. Fuck this snivelling weasel. I read the whole thing. How dare he even suggest he has a fleck of humility in his being. He goes in saying he submitted his changes as an RFC instead of a pull request, but goes balls deep on trying to defend his work as worthy of submitting. Utter bullshit.

      Some quotes:

      My explicit statement of having “no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base” was not seen as a gesture of honest humility,

      “I have no intent on understanding this codebase that I’m 100% sure I’ve created a good change for, be grateful, peasants.”

      also, him, explicitly not a developer, spake thusly:

      This sentiment exposes the raw nerve of the open-source world: developer burnout.

      vibe codes once I am become jeff, coder at google

      Finally, this massive turd:

      The Mesa project’s updated contributor guidelines, which now demand that any submitter of AI-assisted code must understand it as if they wrote it themselves, has been lauded by some as a pragmatic solution. I contend it is a policy of convenience, a blunt instrument designed not to solve a complex problem, but to legislate it out of existence. It is a fortress wall built to protect the status quo, and while it may offer the illusion of security, it does so at the cost of innovation and by silencing a new and potentially valuable class of contributors. The discussion should not end here, with a policy that prioritizes procedural purity over measurable progress. The true challenge has been misdiagnosed; the pathology is not the “user with an AI,” but a rigid, legacy process that lacks the antibodies to handle a new form of discovery.

      Honestly this guy should just start his own fucking codebase where him and his promptfondling circlejerk buddies can vibecode bricks together.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Yeah I was reminded of this guy by some posts on bsky, and mentioned there I didn’t want to link to him directly because I don’t think that kind of stuff is nice and just leads to harassment, but reading those two new blog posts really made me doubt that for a moment. (Of course only posting it here is a good alternative, looking back at the old posts I had also forgotten that he just was a weird conservative).

        I also found the part where he said ‘I even labeled it as an experiment’ quite annoying, that he doesn’t realize that this doesn’t matter at all. The developers still need to evaluate it like any normal post, and he didn’t even ask them permission to do the experiment.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          “I even labeled it as an experiment. A social experiment, some might say. I’m saying it was just a prank, bro. But really you’re the bad person because you were mean to me.” This is DARVO, right?

          You’re right that sharing this stuff leads to harassment, at least a lot of the time. I have no interest in personally engaging with this fuck.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            I’m esp weary of sharing stuff like this on a place like bsky, esp when I was just replying to others being a bit annoyed at people doing LLM based PRs. Hope people here have better self control at not actually going after people.

            • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              One would hope! Don’t piss in the popcorn, as they say. Also, don’t do any stupid shit that might cause more work for our glorious admins, i.e. leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to awful.systems.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Based Linux is another non-Woke option if you want a Debian based system that supports systemd, Wayland, XLibre and the GNU tools.

      Do… do you think he realizes that Debian is “woke”?

      Also I wonder what his beef with Rust is? Is Rust woke?

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Linux puritans are as fissile as the OG Puritans. There’s already Devuan which is Debian minus systemd, and now with XLibre. Not sure why this nerd thinks his particular non-denominational chapel will bring in the crowds to hear him sermonize.

      • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Also I wonder what his beef with Rust is? Is Rust woke?

        I’ve seen this before. There is a special type of person out there who feels emasculated (yeah it’s always men, isn’t it) by the idea of a language statically enforcing memory-safety. Because, you know, real men write C or C++ with no safety rope and no seatbelt, juggling with raw pointers and chainsaws with their bare hands. They think that the only reason why C/C++ has produced an infinite abundance of bugs and security holes is because other programmers just suck. But they are different, they can handle it, they are very clever after all. And they won’t let some wusses take away their powers with all these ideas of memory safety by design.

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          As a C++ programmer some Rust people can come on a little strong, as if I’ve never thought about the importance of memory safety before and don’t know how to write secure code (well excuse me for building on top of decades of libraries that no one thought to write in rust in the '80s).

          But that’s normal programmer flame war stuff. Rust people tend to be young and enthusiastic about security which is all good.

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            pretty much every programming language discussion I’ve ever been in has at least one person come in with a chip on their shoulder, ready to burn down civilisation in the name of readability or ease of use or memory safety or what have you.

            IMO it’s an abyss staring thing; you spend enough time in the code mines and you’ll discover some gleaming orb of fascination. Hypothetically this is cured by grass touching. I have been both places.

            That is why I’m proud to announce my new, everything safe programming language: C’thlaglthorp, or Ctt for short.

            ⠀̸͓͑̌͆͜

            T̷̡̬͖͓̲͒ĥ̴̼͑͗̏͗̐e̴̡̧̦̘̘͉̮̠͍͕̩̫̐̎̎̃͆̄͗̇̂̋́̕͠͝ͅ ̴̧̭͎̮̯̥̣̻͍̫͇̼̪̅̋̈́̃̈̾̆̀̓̓͊͂͝ă̵̧̨͎͓͇̦̝͖͎̓̿͠b̸̨̮͚̣̪̪̪͉̮̙͇͎̍͗̕ý̸̘̘ş̷̣̲͙͓̫̎̿̍̈́͛͗́́͝s̶̞̣͖̼̓̅̀̀̉́̃̈́̾̋̄̎͐̀͘͠ ̸͓̈̔͒̽͝w̵̨͚͖̟͚͇̠̘̻͍͕̲̯͍̑́̀͗́̋̀́͛͜͜͠ĭ̸̳̜̰̥̘̟̠̈́͜l̴̡̧̝̣̂͌̿̍̍̿̋l̶̳̙̰̱̫͉̥̃̇̌̂́̈́́͜ ̵̧̤̻̗͈͓̫̮̳͐͊̀̔̍̈̈́̋͂̚͝k̴̨̛͕̠͇͓̝̝̻̘̱͔̫̰̆͂̌̂̀̂̑̈̋͝͠ĕ̷̯̥̝̟̓̓͑̀ę̵̡̨̨͕͍͔̮͂͋̈̍͒̿͛p̸͇̥̺̅͋͐̿͑̿̎͐̈́͛͝͠ ̶̡̟̫͍̲̗͖̓́̽̐̀̀̇̿͝ÿ̴̢̨͚̟̘̼̭͓̘̲̫̮̩̠̺͉̀͜ớ̶̢̪̤͉͎̟̻̩̣̹̬̈́̅̉̈́͂̓̎͌̾͗̓̕͠u̶̗̥͔̹̝̦͕͎͎͍̹͓͕̾̑́ ̷͍̓̃̏̐̄̒̿̅͂̎̉̈́̚s̵̠̭̠͈̖̺͕̬̞͖̫̿̊́̾̾̕̕ͅá̵̯͓͙͕̉͛͌͛̋̕͘f̶̢̛͈͎̥̗̫͇͕̘̦̙̋̇̓̍̊̋͆̓̈͐̚̚͘͜ͅȩ̷͙̝̳̲̈́̽̈́̍̐͝͠

            • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              1 month ago

              People who dislike C’thlaglthorp tend to come in two camps: the ones that prefer significant whitespace and the ones that don’t.

          • nightsky@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            I was only describing a specific kind of person, certainly wasn’t trying to imply that C/C++ devs generally have no care for security!

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an “AI overview” on the top of the page…

    In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

    Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

    All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

    […]

    For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

    This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    30 days ago

    And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.

    Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.

    it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with

    It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined

    Oof.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      30 days ago

      That’s pretty long and you should definitely repost it in the next sack. I lightly skimmed it and will read it in full later.

      RE, the LLM of it all: Wonder how many times this has already happened:

      “AI, please invent a new project management ideology for me, improving on agile and waterfall!”

      “Certainly. Here’s AgileFall, a linear combination of the two. What the fuck were you expecting here?”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Finally had a chance to listen, continuing to enjoy it greatly and commenting here in liu of having patreon money.

      I feel like some of what you talk about with Powell’s libertarian economics contrasting with his racist cultural chauvinism seems to tie in with our good friends in silicon valley and the way their libertarianism seems to have moved so swiftly into technofascism and getting on board with The Guy. Being openly racist appears to have been almost like the missing piece that ties it into an internally consistent political project.

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        ooh it’s too bad we’ve already recorded the next episode because this comment would 100% have made it into the discussion (about half the episode is a breakdown of sartre’s theory of the bigot’s psychology). what you’re saying about loud and proud racism as an internal integrative element makes so much sense to me. economic libertarians want to dissolve the state and that’s in tension with their (economic, emotional, whatever) reliance on the state. you can resolve the dissonance of that contradiction by making it your mission to organize society along racial lines

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    link

    article link

    transcript

    Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.

    A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sexworkers he could hire who could help him with that.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        30 days ago

        I don’t think sex workers should be tasked with society offloading glinner

        glinner should fucking suck less

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          30 days ago

          Certainly. Some might want to take his service however, not going to speak for them. But doubt he would be a good client, nor that he would pass the vibe check for any who didn’t already knew who he was. So not sure if he is even able (also doubt he is mentally able as he sees women too much as objects to he saved/protected vs actual people).

          But yes sorry if that came off as offloading societies problems on sex workers.

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      oh no

      He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.

  • lagrangeinterpolator@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    30 days ago

    Promptfans still can’t get over the Erdős problems. Thankfully, even r/singularity has somehow become resistant to the most overhyped claims. I don’t think I need to comment on this one.

    Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1pag5mp/aristotle_from_harmonicmath_just_proved_erdos/

    alt text (original claim)

    We are on the cusp of a profound change in the field of mathematics. Vibe proving is here.

    Aristotle from @HarmonicMath just proved Erdos Problem #124 in @leanprover, all by itself. This problem has been open for nearly 30 years since conjectured in the paper “Complete sequences of sets of integer powers” in the journal Acta Arithmetica.

    Boris Alexeev ran this problem using a beta version of Aristotle, recently updated to have stronger reasoning ability and a natural language interface.

    Mathematical superintelligence is getting closer by the minute, and I’m confident it will change and dramatically accelerate progress in mathematics and all dependent fields.

    alt text (comments)

    Gcd conditions removed, still great, but really hate the way people shill their stuff without any rigor to explaining the process. A lot of things become very easy when you remove a simple condition. Heck reimann hypothesis is technically solved for function fields over finite fields. But nowadays in the age of hype, a tweet post would probably say “Reimann hypothesis oneshotted by AI” even though that’s not true.

    Gcd conditions removed

    So they didn’t solve the actual problem?

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      29 days ago

      Stuff like this is particularly frustrating because this is one of they places where I have to grudgingly admit that llm coding assistants could actually deliver… it turns out that having to state a problem unambiguously and having a way in which answers can be automatically checked for correctness means that you don’t have to worry about bullshit engines bullshitting you so much.

      No llm is going to give good answers to “solve the riemann hypothesis in the style of euler, cantor, tao, 4k 8k big boobies do not hallucinate” and for everything else the problem then becomes “can you formally specify the parameters of your problem such that correct solutions are unambiguous” and now you need your professional mathematicians and computer scientists and cryptographers still…

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    30 days ago

    That popular piece on why it’s dumb to build (GenAI-scale) in space hit lobste.rs, and while most commenters agreed it is indeed dumb, fascist Flask founder felt the need to “well ackstually” for some stupid reason

    https://lobste.rs/c/mmq7sy

    duh ofc there are computers in space, there are computers everywhere, but the whole fucking point of the piece is you can’t take thousands of racks of GPUs and launch them into space and expect them to work