this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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TechTakes

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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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[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (2 children)

New Yorker put out an article on how AI use is homogenizing thought processes and writing ability.

Our friends on the orange site have clambored over each other to all make very similar counteraguments. Kind of proves the article, no?

I love this one:

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Holy shit. Yes, TV has reduced the strength of accents. But "the death"? Tell me again how little you pay attention to the people you inevitably interact with day to day.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 4 points 7 hours ago

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Listen to a Geordie for five minutes and say that to me with a straight face. I fucking dare you. (Not you, the orange site member)

Also tell me more about how you don't have a lower-class or nonwhite-coded accent.

[–] UltimateNoob@programming.dev 12 points 14 hours ago (3 children)
[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 6 points 6 hours ago

According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios.

Guys I have found a way to phrase my anxiety in a way where every single word is extremely load-bearing

[–] istewart@awful.systems 2 points 7 hours ago

It's like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 5 points 14 hours ago

@UltimateNoob @techtakes This is … actually really neat feedstock for us SF authors, amirite?

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (2 children)

Was checking out the QOI image format and the politics of the dev and found that he is pretty comfortable around the ladybird people. (sigh) Also the r slur on twitter.

Really amazing that such a simple format achieves PNG sizes and faster encoding speeds. 1-page specification, though it's more like 2 with a bit bigger text, for bragging rights.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Wait Ladybird is anti-woke? Sigh am I going to have to make my own browser?

(I know I know I'm a lot better about posting about wanting to do cool stuff than actually doing it, hazard of having a full time job)

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah I saw that but had completely forgotten about it in the meanwhile because I have the memory of a goldfish.

In the grand scheme of things there are worse controversies, but I would so love an enthusiast browser that is, well, "woke" rather than one having a faint stink of techbro worldview about it.

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Dominic Szablewski also founded the German image board pr0gramm where he is known under the name cha0s. It's similar to 4chan in many ways. That he enjoys the Ladybird crowd isn't surprising.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 7 points 23 hours ago

Woah i had no idea. Apparently he also made a web crypto miner used in hacked sites.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Another response to Ptacek. "Vibe coding as contempt for materiality" part is particularly good.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/material_girl

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 9 hours ago

Sure, done.

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

Concurring with everyone else that this is a 10/10 read. This article lays out a very reasonable theory that explains why tech maniacs are the way that they are.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the "contempt" framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist "you can do/be anything!" cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (I'm tempted to use Neil Postman's term "technopoly," but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.

Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

That is the kind of writing that absolutely anyone can get a thing out of. Will cause me to introspect.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We were joking about this last week if memory serves, but at least one person out there has started a rough aggregator of different sources of pre-AI internet dumps.

It's all gotta be in the models by now, but it's gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago

It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?

It'll also be helpful for helping the 'Net recover from the slop-nami once AI finally dies.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

✨The Vibe✨ is indeed getting increasingly depressing at work.

It's also killing my parents' freelance translation business, there is still money in live interpreting, and prestige stuff or highly technical accuracy very obviously matters stuff, but a lot of stuff is drying up.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Woke: pile driving AI advocates

Bespoke: pounding prediction market peddlers

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

AI powered lie detectors spotted in the wild - https://pimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100.png => https://eyecanknow.com/

Brought to you by researchers at the University of Utah. smh.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 16 points 2 days ago

Dan McQuillian just dropped the text of a seminar he gave: The role of the University is to resist AI

[–] corbin@awful.systems 20 points 3 days ago

Last Week Tonight's rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Starting this off with Baldur Bjarnason sneering at his fellow techies for their "reading" of Dante's Inferno:

Reading through my feed reader and seeing tech dilettantes “doing” Dante in a week and change, I’m reminded of the time in university when we spent half a semester discussing Dante’s Divine Comedy, followed by tracing it’s impact and influence over the centuries

I don’t think these assholes even bother to read their footnotes, and their writing all sounds like it comes from ChatGPT. Naturally so, because I believe them when they claim they don’t use it for writing. They’re just genuinely that dull

At least read the footnotes FFS

If they were reading Dante for pleasure, that’d be different—genuinely awesome, even. But all of this is framed as doing the entirety of “humanities” in the space of a few weeks.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (2 children)

They'd have a better chance convincing techbros to do a serious literary analysis of the video game.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

There is a reason they picked books to speedrun and not games, speedrunning games takes skill.

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@YourNetworkIsHaunted

Maybe they read X-Men King Size Annual #4 (1980)

[–] jonhendry@iosdev.space 5 points 1 day ago

@YourNetworkIsHaunted

Not to cast aspersions, I thought the issue rocked as a teen and re-bought a copy about 20 years ago.

But it's still "based on a story by Dante Allighieri" rather than being the real stuff.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago
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