this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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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.

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Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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 so 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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[–] macroplastic@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Of course, the "AI Control" in Firefox for Android conveniently doesn't include the "make a wanking motion-to-llm-summarize a-page" "feature" Mozilla has added.

[–] schnoopy@awful.systems 1 points 2 hours ago

Bwahaha I didn't believe you but it's there. Gotta find the option in about:config to kill it.

Who is that for? "Ahh I'm so angry, why are you showing me big words and multiple paragraphs phone? where are the emoji bullet points? Ahhh — oh hey it got replaced with something vaguely related and unchallenging. Thanks firefox"

[–] samvines@awful.systems 7 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

This Geekwire piece about anti-ai movement being just like the anti-gmo movement really boils my piss.

The anti GMO movement was non scientific and the reasons to reject the tech were always vibes. Whereas AI is entirely vibes and the reason to reject it are abundant and obvious - I don't need to list them in this forum.

Why did GMOs win the long game? Three reasons that map almost exactly onto AI-generated content.

First, the product is indistinguishable. Nobody can tell whether the corn syrup in their soda came from a bioengineered cob, and after a while they stop wondering. AI-written prose is already past the Turing threshold for casual reading. Many readers cannot tell a competent LLM draft from a competent human one.

Yes because LLMs are so great at prose. They definitely don't keep telling the same story about the same made up characters and locations. And they don't produce hallucinations that keep getting people into trouble.

Now the techno fascist billionaire class know how much we hate AI we shouldn't be too surprised that the flaks are out in force trying to spin anti-ai sentiment as an unjustified position for an educated people. We're doing something right folks. Keep fighting the good fine.

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 7 points 7 hours ago

@samvines @techtakes It's also missing the point that the original GMO crops that were being promoted were engineered by Monsanto to survive being drenched in Glyphosate, a probably-carcinogenic pesticide, to produce a monopoly in those crop plants for Monsanto. Ugly side of capitalism.

(If they'd led with golden rice, the reaction would have been different.)

It also arrived in the late stages of the BSE cull in the UK, at a time when food supply anxiety was at an all-time high.

[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 2 points 6 hours ago

A migrant from the San Francisco Bay Area returned for a software conference and was creeped out by the ads on billboards and public transit. "VIDEO CREATES SHAREHOLDER VALUE" "YOU DO NOT EXIST WITHOUT VIDEO" https://www.simplermachines.com/something-is-very-wrong-in-san-francisco/

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

it's nice to have a preprint about a phenomenon that has been weaponized years ago. it's easy to say that in retrospect, but it was easy to say that in advance too. there are also bots that might try to do something similar on lemmy

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

The AI hype wave is the Dancing Plague for people who can't dance.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 11 hours ago

nasb some criticism of the human damage is tasting up eve in places like ieee spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/measuring-ai-societal-impact-khan