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)
Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.
PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I’m bricking it.
I know a bit about qgis + wfs (and surroundings)? enough to be dangerous tho
I don’t know what these acronyms mean 🫡
I’m just going to have to send an email in and be like hi I’m out of my depth. Can I still pass this class if I fail this assignment
Going outside awful’s wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the world’d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like “whoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, we’ll get a policy in place”.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Logan’s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
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?
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 🤦🏻♂️
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”
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.
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?
The AI lawsuit’s going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the “created” notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”
