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·
      5 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·
        5 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·
      6 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·
        6 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·
        6 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·
            6 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·
              6 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·
              5 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·
      5 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·
    6 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·
    7 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·
        6 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·
          6 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.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    9·
    7 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·
      11 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.