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)
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.
for the love of beebo can i just get like eleventeen seconds pls where i dont have to put up with the sociopathy that is academic cs
Brian Merchant put out a “complete guide to luddite horror films”, which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.
On a personal note, I suspect “luddite horror” (alternatively called “techno-horror”) is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.
Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone’s faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google’s glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT’s fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned “AI” as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.
FastCompany: “In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots”
It’s interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need “Apple Intelligence”[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous “Crush” AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday… I find it just alienating.
Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can’t find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don’t think anyone can.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.