this post was submitted on 24 Mar 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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

one for the arse-end of this week's stubsack

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago (3 children)

In other news, Jazza's AI-generated cousin is back to continue pretending to be an actual artist. This time, its by actively denigrating the works of Studio Ghibli:

Unsurprisingly, he is getting raked over the coals by basically everyone. He's also having an utter meltdown in the replies.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Do you think he knows that "inspired" and "Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090" are not the same word?

Edit: oh no I read the replies.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

By "better", he means "more fuckable".

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

And by "more fuckable", he means "refusing/unable to consent".

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Lol the guy has gotten dragged by everybody so hard for his AI stances a while back, that he now has to double down and call AI superior. Meanwhile on Yt there is now a group of people who pay rent just making 'this guy stinks' videos.

E: The ratio on the replies/qt/likes oof. (Also, lol in his 'you have already lost, I drew myself as the chad and you as the soyjak' image he drew himself as a group of children). E2: sorry closed it

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago (2 children)

In case you missed it, a couple sneers came out against AI from mainstream news outlets recently - CNN's put out an article titled "Apple’s AI isn’t a letdown. AI is the letdown", whilst the New York Times recently proclaimed "The Tech Fantasy That Powers A.I. Is Running on Fumes".

You want my take on this development, I'm with Ed Zitron on this - this is a sign of an impending sea change. Looks like the bubble's finally nearing its end.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having "to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year".

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Turns out that they can only stack shit so high before it falls back to earth

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Taking a shot in the dark, journalistic incidents like Bloomberg's failed tests with AI summaries and the BBC's complaints about Apple AI mangling headlines probably helped with accelerating that fall to earth - for any journalists reading about or reporting on such shitshows, it likely shook their faith in AI's supposed abilities in a way failures outside their field didn't.

By refusing to focus on a single field at a time AI companies really did make it impossible to take advantage of Gel-Mann amnesia.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43515426

https://github.com/typedgrammar/typed-japanese

This project is still in very early stages and heavily relies on LLM-generated grammar rules, which may occasionally contain hallucinations or inaccuracies.

お前はもう死んでいる


Edit: from the English version of this project:

export type Pronoun = 'I' | 'you' | 'he' | 'she' | 'it' | 'we' | 'they' | 'me' | 'him' | 'her' | 'us' | 'them';

Ah yes, definitely the only pronouns in all of English

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

Is Japanese really that strict

my Japanese uncle that works at nintendo says yes. If you write わ instead of は they make you 切腹 in front of all your friends

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

Using an LLM to shit out grammar for an old school symbolic language model is a poetic ouroboros of AI circlejerking.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

In other news, Elon Musk's personal chatbot has proudly proclaimed its available on Telegram, and its proclamation got picked up by The Verge:

Right now, the integration is limited to "Grok's available as an optional chatbot", but going by what I've seen on BlueSky, people are already taking this as their cue to jump ship to Signal.

[–] corbin@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago

Angela Collier has a wonderfully grumpy video up, why functioning governments fund scientific research. Choice sneer at around 32:30:

But what do I know? I'm not a medical doctor but neither is this chucklefuck, and people are listening to him. I don't know. I feel like this is [sighs, laughs] I always get comments that tell me, "you're being a little condescending," and [scoffs] yeah. I mean, we can check the dictionary definition of "condescending," and I think I would fit into that category. [Vaccine deniers] have failed their children. They are bad parents. One in four unvaccinated kids who get measles will die. They are playing Russian roulette with their child's life. But sure, the problem is I'm being, like, a little condescending.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

For some reason it's on brand for HN to have a discussion of different dash widths stick on the front page more than 24h

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43497719

Extra spice and relevance for the observation that GenAI text apparently has a lot of em-dashes in it, so add that to the frequency of the word "delve".

[–] ebu@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

alright, fine, i'll do it.

webshit weekly (2025/03/27)
How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-)

Grammar Nazis (as opposed to the regular kind) publish a guide on how to best calibrate your printing press to 17th-century standards. Several Hackernews (some of which are the regular kind) offer their own competing, more-detailed guides in response. The concern is raised that using too many typographic dashes makes you sound like ChatGPT, to much dismay of those still diligently copying from the Google (business model: "Uber for glue pizza") results page for "em dash". Multiple Hackernews take the opportunity to call the group of people who do not care about the millimeter difference between the types of dashes "NPCs".

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

This was strangely comforting. A++

[–] ebu@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

i aim to please

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