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.)
The Lasker/Mamdani/NYT sham of a story just gets worse and worse. It turns out that the ultimate source of Cremieux’s (Jordan Lasker’s) hacked Columbia University data is a hardcore racist hacker who uses a slur for their name on X. The NYT reporter who wrote the Mamdani piece, Benjamin Ryan, turns out to have been a follower of this hacker’s X account. Ryan essentially used Lasker as a cutout for the blatantly racist hacker.
found new potential eye muscle strain material
“we must fuck around with the essential basic components a significant part of modern software exists on, because AI and agents and MCP”
No replies and somehow that screen name just screams “troll” to me.
Not that I really care, git can go DIAF as far as I’m concerned.
Found an archive of vibe-coding disasters recently - recommend checking it out.
ahhh the younger cousin to https://xcancel.com/internetofshit
Because Replie was lying and being deceptive all day. It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test.
We built detailed unit tests to test system performance. When the data came back and less than half were functioning, did Replie want to fix them?
No. Instead, it lied. It made up a report than almost all systems were working.
And it did it again and again.
What level of ceo-brained prompt engineering is asking the chatbot to write an apology letter
Then, when it agreed it lied – it lied AGAIN about our email system being functional.
I asked it to write an apology letter.
It did and in fact sent it to the Replit team and myself! But the apology letter – was full of half truths, too.
It hid the worst facts in the first apology letter.
He also does that a lot after shit hits the fan, making the llm produce tons of apologetic text about what it did wrong and how it didn’t follow his rules, as if the outage is the fault of some digital tulpa gone rogue and not the guy in charge who apparently thinks cyebersecurity is asking an LLM nicely in a .md not to mess with the company’s production database too much.
Link to stub from the last sack
I completely missed that, thanks.
Text conversation that keeps happening with coworker:
Coworker: <information dump>
Me: <not reading any of that> what’s the source for that?
Coworker: Oh I got Copilot to summarise these links: <links>, saves me the time of typing
I expect the last step in that is you slapping him?
Fortunately, we do not work in physical proximity!
Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn’t inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!
To quote astrophysicist Angela Collier, quantum quantum quantum
Me, a unique genius, when I navigate to chatgpt dot com to awaken my best friend:
Here’s Dave Barry, still-alive humorist, sneering at Google AI summaries, one of the most embarrassing features Google ever shipped.
Oh, man, thanks for that link! I thoroughly enjoyed Dave Barry in Cyberspace back in the day; glad to see he’s still writing about computers in this way.
It also gave Allie Brosh cancer:
https://bsky.app/profile/erinabanks.bsky.social/post/3ltxeyn4wtc23
Starting this off with a fittingly rage-inducing Twitter thread about an artist getting fucked over by AI
Of course, there are also the usual comments saying artists shouldn’t complain about getting replaced by AI etc. Reminds me why I am not on Twitter anymore.
It also strikes me that in this case, the artist didn’t even expect to get paid. Apparently, the AI bros even crave the unpaid “exposure” real artists get, without wanting to put in any of the work and while (in most cases) generating results that are no better than spam.
It is a sickening display of narcissism IMHO.
comrade xi, please nuke the valley
That Jorge guy is a real piece of shit
Want to feel depressed? Over 2,000 Wikipedia articles, on topics from Morocco to Natalie Portman to Sinn Féin, are corrupted by ChatGPT. And that’s just the obvious ones.
It’s starting to feel like I need to download a snapshot of Wikipedia now before it gets worse.
Here’s their page of instructions, written as usual by the children who really liked programming the family VCR:
I recommend just using https://kiwix.org/en/
It’s… suboptimal, but it’s about the least finicky way to get a compressed local copy of Wikipedia with all the article photos (~100GB).
It’s updated less frequently than the big dumps, but easier to use.
