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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Kicking off the sack with something light.
I see RicksCEO.eth has since quietly removed the “.eth” part of his name. Presumably it was way more embarrassing than being a strip club tycoon.
some years ago I wanted to build a bot that tracks all these loons, but the twitter API reqs are onerous as fuck so I never bothered
feel like there’s probably still a need for something like that. perhaps even more so than before, given how mask-off the snakepit is getting
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop
this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious
if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.
Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there’s people who don’t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they’re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
Oh, he’s apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197
Knowing the context doesn’t really change anything about this tweet though.
why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
I’ve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones’ embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google “chatgpt strawberry” and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you’re still streered to marketing material.
Either way, I’m looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.
i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty
it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you
camping out on a friend’s box, two others had root, but they effectively never bothered. the disk filled one day and i went looking for stuff that wasn’t useful. found that site, found it really was where DNS pointed.
my current box is the descendant of that one
Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:
We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?
from someone on Mastodon:
Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.
If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.
I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.
I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation
(promotion driven dev)
Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.
God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.
Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.
Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”
If the purpose of a metric is to show adoption, the metric can be defined in a way to show adoption. Could be just an effect of promo driven culture, AI push and good’ol Goodhart’s law.
Like, how do you even measure when code is ai authored and when not. If you insert 25% of a variable name and the autocompleter guesses the rest of the name correctly, are the remaining 75% AI generated?
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.
which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)
At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.
The reason I think it was a freebie is:
- Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
- Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
- Cyberpunk
20222077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch
It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.
Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻♂️
NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle’s latest video “Big Tech is Going Nuclear!” (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it’s an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant “well, done with you” - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I’m sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people
The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.
The term “AI” damages sales when used in advertising - whatever script Boyle got was definitely written by people who knew that fact.
I also predicted something like this would happen (though within a very specific context) a while ago - seems my prediction’s coming true.
The guy seems shrewd enough to know publicly supporting anything AI will shred his reputation - I suspect he might have been duped.
And this puts the bit from the other video with the referral links into context. It’s not a joke, he actually expects to be making money off of people :(. I found the vagueness in the ad jarring too. There’s this thing called sponsorblock, a database of timestamps for videos that skips useless stuff. The downside is you don’t find out if the guy that you’re watching is a shill.