Want to wade into the snowy 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 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. This was a bit late - I was too busy goofing around on Discord)

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Shit like Palladium is going to be absolutely hilarious to dig up in the back of a used bookstore 20 years from now

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Made all the funnier by the fact that probably my favorite Hacker News thread of all time is on Tivy’s article about how he abandoned his job to “court” his wife:

        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29830743

        If even the orange site is willing to roast you this hard, I guess your only response has to be pulling up stakes to go live in a neofascist social bubble instead.

        • saucerwizard@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          He worked in fuel cells (hence the palladium name) and I think he got a bunch of stock option shit. Also “court” lol.

      • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        skill issue

        it’s the actual cite, you’ve been led to the water, come the fuck on it’s not even a paywall

        • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 months ago

          I didn’t make the comment because I struggled bypassing it, but because calling out this UI dark pattern bullshit feels topical here and I wasn’t sure if OP was aware it was in place.

          Judging from votes, other people found the skyview link novel/useful, so it was constructive!

          • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 months ago

            i’ll cut the coiners some slack on this one because requiring a login to view is an account level privacy option. i don’t know what the option is supposed to actually do. but that’s what it is

            • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              It might help to know that Paul Frazee, one of the BlueSky developers, doesn’t understand capability theory or how hackers approach a computer. They believe that anything hidden by the porcelain/high-level UI is hidden for good. This was a problem on their Beaker project, too; they thought that a page was deleted if it didn’t show up in the browser. They fundamentally aren’t prepared for the fact that their AT protocol doesn’t have a way to destroy or hide data and is embedded into a network that treats censorship as reparable damage.

            • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”

              if bsky is supposed to be federated, then it does nothing, but as it is today with 99%+ of users on main instance, it only works as a recruitment tool for bsky

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore

      what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on

      them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Relatedly:

        As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. […] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. […] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.

        https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/

    the usecase is spam:

    The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.

    I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.

    • Rinn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.

  • NextElephant9@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it’s “better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually).” Then you log in into the app and you see there’s an update about your flight, but you don’t see what it’s about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that’s better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).

  • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey’s video about deaccenting in English language and how “AI” speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it’s usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn’t use destressing.

    It reminded me of a particular line in Portal

    spoilers for Portal (2007 puzzle game)

    GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) “Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin.”

    The words “the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin” are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOS’s voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.

    Now I’m wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

    It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

      Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated “without changing its stress”.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        That’s interesting. If I weren’t going for a comical effect I’d try and rephrase the sentence, probably with a relative pronoun or something similar, but if unable to do so* I’d probably deemphasize the whole phrase the second time I say it. Though in terms of multi-word phrased, I think intonation would be the more accurate word to use than stress per se.

        *“To do so” would be another way to avoid repetition

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      What the fuck would an “AI browser” even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.

      I can’t help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla’s bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google’s bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there’s an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they’re ideas and not just “what if we added <latest fad> into <product>”.

      AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.

      I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like “we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a ‘cave painting first’ society” and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.

  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Introducing the Palantir shit sandwich combo: Get a cover up for the CEO tweaking out and start laying the groundwork for the AGI god’s priest class absolutely free!

    https://mashable.com/article/palantir-ceo-neurodivergent

    TL;DR- Palantir CEO tweaks out during an interview. Definitely not any drugs guys, he’s just neurodivergent! But the good, corporate approved kind. The kind that has extra special powers that make them good at AI. They’re so good at AI, and AI is the future, so Palantir is starting a group of neurodivergents hand picked by the CEO (to lead humanity under their totally imminent new AI god). He totally wasn’t tweaking out. He’s never even heard of cocaine! Or billionaire designer drugs! Never ever!

    Edit: To be clear, no hate against neurodivergence, or skepticism about it in general. I’m neurodivergent. And yeah, some types of neurodivergence tend to result in people predisposed to working in tech.

    But if you’re the fucking CEO of Palantir, surely you’ve been through training for public appearances. It’s funnier that it didn’t take, but this is clearly just an excuse.

    I strongly feel that it’s an attempt to start normalizing the elevation of certain people into positions of power based off vague characteristics they were born with.

    Lemmy post that pointed me to this: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51704917

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I feel bad for the gullible ND people who spend time applying to this thinking they might have a chance and it isn’t a high level coverup attempt.

      Otoh, somebody should take some fun drugs and tape their interviews, see how it works out. Are there any Hunter S Tech journalists around?

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Jesus. This being 2025 of course he had to clarify that it’s definitely not DEI. Also it really grinds me gears to see hyperfocus listed as one of the “beneficial” aspects because there’s no way it’s not exploitative. Hey, so you know how sometimes you get so caught up in a project you forget to eat? Just so you know, you could starve on the clock. For me.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.

      A half dozen people might still be reading hackernews on punchcards so they ha-

      ve no choice but to argue about how to shorten “long” titles every day.

      • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:

        We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had instead…

        I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        80 character limit

        Lot of roguelike development in the past was still obsessed with that. Was a bit amusing, think even they have dropped this now.

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai

    Miller’s team also recently used software from startup StackAI to develop an AI-powered app that writes letters of recommendation, saving faculty members time. Faculty type basic details about a student who has requested a letter, such as their grades and accomplishments, and the app writes a draft of the full letter.

    AI is “one of those things that you might worry could dehumanize the process of writing recommendation letters, but faculty also say that process [of manually writing the letters] is very labor intensive,” Miller said. “So far they’ve gotten a lot out of” the new app.

    Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs aren’t for generic B+ students that you don’t even remember, just say no.

    I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    For more lighthearted gaming-related news, Capcom fired off a quick sneer, whilst (indirectly) promoting their their latest Mega Man game:

    (alt text: “As a reminder for those entering the Mega Man: Dual Override Boss Design Art Contest, please remember the rules posted at bit.ly/MMDORobotMaster. Entrants must follow this account, and please leave the AI to the robots: generative AI is prohibited for this contest.”)