this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago (7 children)
[–] roaminchemicals@mastodon.social 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

@dgerard @blakestacey like that Looney Tunes bit of cutting down an entire tree to make a single toothpick

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

you'd think that $200+ entertainment would be better

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Oh no it's more US politics.

So as part of the ongoing administrative coup; federal employees have been receiving stupid emails from what everyone assumes is Elon Musk (since it's the exact same playbook as the twitter firings). But they apparently royally flubbed up NOAA's email security in the process so the employees are getting constant spam through an unsecured broadcast address.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago

Finally a thing Musk prob did all by himself, after the printout your code thing I assume his technical knowledge is firmly stuck in 1999.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 15 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Getting pretty tired of new coworker spruiking copilot all the time, please send me your sympathy and energy so I can weather this trial

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You have my sympathy! Is the worst part that you have to review the slop or its general presence at all?

Asking because at my workplace it will be allowed soon, and some coworkers are unfortunately looking forward to it, and I'm horrified, especially by the thought of having to do code review then...

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago

It’s more the latter. I can’t really stop anyone from using it, and playing the game of “can you tell if this snippet of code was LLMed” is a fools errand, so I have to choose to ignore that part of it. Testing de-risks bad code, but there is never enough testing… well, there’s only so much I can do within my pay grade.

I’ve since asked this person to stop talking about their copilot usage, so this issue has been resolved, for now.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

I have added your coworker to the list of people I will imagine being tortured in the future. Im no robotgod but it is the best I can do.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

that word temporarily broke me (its constituent phonemes are all valid/typical afrikaans (and dutch) but the word itself made no sense), then I looked it up

that sounds exhausting. I wish to flippantly suggest launching your colleague to another planet, but cruel fate might reveal them to be a muskovian martian so perhaps best not to broach that subject..

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago

People have worked out how to cram DeepSeek onto a Raspberry Pi

Anyways, here's a quasi-related sidenote:

Part of me suspects DeepSeek is gonna quickly carve out a good chunk of the market for itself - for SaaS services looking for spicy autocomplete or a slop generator to bolt on to their products, DeepSeek's high efficiency gives them a way to do it that doesn't immediately blow a massive hole in their finances.

[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)
[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 24 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

Neo-Nazi nutcase having a normal one.

It's so great that this isn't falsifiable in the sense that doomers can keep saying, well "once the model is epsilon smarter, then you'll be sorry!", but back in the real world: the model has been downloaded 10 million times at this point. Somehow, the diamanoid bacteria has not killed us all yet. So yes, we have found out the Yud was wrong. The basilisk is haunting my enemies, and she never misses.

Bonus sneer: "we are going to find out if Yud was right" Hey fuckhead, he suggested nuking data centers to prevent models better than GPT4 from spreading. R1 is better than GPT4, and it doesn't require a data center to run so if we had acted on Yud's geopolitical plans for nuclear holocaust, billions would have been for incinerated for absolutely NO REASON. How do you not look at this shit and go, yeah maybe don't listen to this bozo? I've been wrong before, but god damn, dawg, I've never been starvingInRadioactiveCratersWrong.

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 22 points 1 week ago
[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

you can get banned on facebook now for linking to distrowatch https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/facebook-flags-linux-topics-as-cybersecurity-threats-posts-and-users-being-blocked and from distrowatch https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

but it's not as bad as you think, it's slightly worse. it's not only distrowatch and linux groups got banned too

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I screenshot this the other day and forgot to post it. Well, enjoy.]

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (1 children)

In the process of looking for ways to link up with homeschool parents that aren't doing it for culty reasons, I accidentally discovered the existence of a small but active subreddit for "progressive monarchists". It's titled r/progressivemonarchists, because their imagination in naming conventions only slightly outatrips their imagination for forms of government. Given how our usual sneer fodder overlaps with nrx I figured there are others here who I can inflict this headache on.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (9 children)

A silhouette of a nuclear family with their heads overlaid by the flags of Australia, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. Above them king Charles of Normal Island holding and umbrella, shielding them from rain labeled "Trumpism and far right ideology".

Quality shitpost, I could imagine some thirteen year old actually believing this.

Flags of Spain, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Sweden, the UK, Norway, Andorra, Luxembourg and Belgium. Above the quote: "On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies" from George Orwell

Yea, no fascism whatsoever took place in the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, or Belgium during WW2, in which they were all very successfully avoiding being occupied by fascists.

Extra points to Spain who already avoided succumbing to their own homegrown brand of fascism before the Nazi German invasion of Poland, and where they avoided having fascists in power all the way until the 1970s. There's a book I quite like about the war where that happened called Homage to Catalonia. I wonder if Orwell ever read it.

Missing from the list is Italy, which is no longer a constitutional monarchy, but used to be until 1946, which is why they were so good at avoiding fascism they even named it.

This might take the cake for the dumbest take I've seen from George Orwell and not for a lack of competition.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago

Screenshot of an insta post of a screenshot of a tweet

Tweet:

I can’t believe ChatGPT lost its job to AI

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

(Reposting from the last thread)

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

P.S. sorry for the linkedin link behind the mastodon link, but shared suffering and all that. I had to read "Uber for AI code data" so now you do too.

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[–] rook@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (2 children)

And on a less downbeat and significantly more puerile note, Dan Fixes Coin Ops makes a nice analogy for companies integrating ai into their product.

https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/112847573063473767

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Live: Chinese AI bot DeepSeek sparks US market turmoil, wiping $500bn off major tech firm

Shares for leading US chip-maker Nvidia dropped more than 15% after the emergence of DeepSeek, a low-cost Chinese AI bot.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjr85l2e4l4t

lmao

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Folks around here told me AI wasn't dangerous 😰 ; fellas I just witnessed a rogue Chinese AI do 1 trillion dollars of damage to the US stock market 😭 /s

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