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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.
does awful have taglines enabled? this would be nice as one
I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with āAIā and their latest earnings report the CEO was an āAI avatarā delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/
No one:
Absolutely nobody:
Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?
If thereās any good news to pull from this, people are doing buy now pay later on AI powered burritos but skipping the pay later portion.
nasb, hedgehog review on promptfans and learning
Got a pair of notable things I ran across recently.
Firstly, an update on Grokās White Genocide Disaster: the person responsible has seemingly revealed themselves, and shown off how they derailed Grokās prompt.. The pull request that initiated this debacle has been preserved on the Internet Archive.
Second, I ran across a Bluesky post which caught my attention:
You want my opinion on the āscabā comment, its another textbook example of the all-consuming AI backlash, one that suggests any usage of AI will be viewed as an open show of hostility towards labour.
Think you are misreading the blog post. They did this after the Grok had its white genocide hyperfocus thing. It shows the process of the xAI public github (their fix (??) for Groks hyperfocus) is bad, not that they started it. (There is also no reason to believe this github is actually what they are using directly (would be pretty foolish of them, which is why I could also believe they could be using it))
New piece from Gary Marcus: AI may have just influenced Argentinaās election
Heās not 100% certain that the AI deepfake a reader sent him ultimately influenced the election results, but the mere possibility that AI screwed someone out of getting elected is gonna be a major topic in Argentine politics for a good while, and I expect AIās effects on democracy will come under pretty heavy scrutiny as a result.
Just thinking about how I watched āSoylent Greenā in high school and thought the idea of a future where technology just doesnāt work anymore was impossible. Then LLMs come and the first thing people want to do with them is to turn working code into garbage, and then the immediate next thing is to kill living knowledge by normalising people relying on LLMs for operational knowledge. Soon, the oceans will boil, agricultural industries will collapse and weāll be forced to eat recycled human. How the fuck did they get it so right?
Doesnt help that there is a group of people who go āusing the poor like
biofuelfood what a good ideaā.E: Really influential movie btw. ;)
A real modest
brunch
He sure fucking did and itās great.
These people are antithetical to whatās good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation ā on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesnāt fucking care about.
No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isnāt just dumb because governments arenāt businesses. Itās dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.
Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328
The main objection being along the lines of, āMilton Friedmanās āI am not a racistā tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt.ā
That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long š
TBF, Zitron has āwrap[ped] together everything Iāve written going back to [his] remote work coverage from 2021ā with this piece - it was naturally gonna be long as hell.
Making an MCU comparison is deeply cliche at this point, but Zitron basically penned his personal equivalent to Avengers: Endgame with this - the impressive length is completely warranted.
NASB: A question I asked myself in the shower: āIs there some kind of evolving, sourced document containing all the reasons why LLMs should be turned off?ā Then I remembered wikis exist. Wikipedia doesnāt have a dedicated ācriticisms of LLMsā page afaict, or even a āCriticismsā section on the LLM page. RationalWiki has a page on LLMs that is almost exclusively criticisms, which is great, but the tone is a few notches too casual and sneery for universal use.
Noted race science proponent and all-around slimeball Cremieux aka J Lasker reveals himself to be a union-hater
Love how all these EdGy DiSsIdEnT tHiNkErS eventually become indistinguishable from big-standard ācons
Net number of studies reporting positive or negative effects (excluding wages)
excluding wages! (and probably also benefits, retirement, a cap on working hours per day etc)
Is that whole thing in the comments about unions bad because monopolies bad and unions are just monopolies of labor the latest in bootlicking theory? Hadnāt really heard this take before.
Studies find unions have negative impacts on things unions arenāt concerned with improving. What impact do they have on their actual goal i.e. protecting workers and improving their lot? We didnāt bother asking.
Something something UMWA.
ah yes, itās that marxist notion, the monopoly of the proletariat
Ben S voice āLook for the sake of the argument, what if we just assume im right, and ignore everything that shows Iām wrong. What then? Checkmate liberal!ā
Wow cool numbers, love to put all unions in one big bag regardless of goals, ideology, trade and mode of action.
āYou claim to like unions, but seem strangely hostile to police unions. Curious.ā
- Turning Point USA
IWW intensifies
A lawyer who depends on a sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from a sovereign citizen.
Considering how LLMs are trained, they prob contain a lot of sov cit stuff, wonder if a lawyer/judge can trick a LLM into going full sovcit by just adding a few words/rephrasing a bit.
Absolutely!
The thing about sov cits is that they use legalish words like a magical incantation. The words have no meaning to them, really. Itās a tarted-up glossolalia which reifies their wishes to manifest some outcome in court.
If a lawyer surrenders their craft to a bullshit engine, theyāre doing the exact same thing: spouting law-shaped nonsense in the hope of getting the verdict they want, their only differentiator being that they showed up wearing a much nicer suit than the sov cit.
āChatGPT, does the fringe on the flag mean that this is an Admiralty court? Also, please enlighten me on the finer points of bird law.ā
Itās wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.
Oh god, so many horror quotes in there.
With a community of 116 million users a month, Duolingo has amassed loads of data about how people learn
ā¦and thatās why I try to avoid using smartphone apps as much as possible.
āUltimately, Iām not sure that thereās anything computers canāt really teach you,ā
How about common senseā¦
āitās just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.ā
Ugh. So terrible. Techās obsession with āscalingā is one of the worst things about tech.
If āitās one teacher and like 30 students, each teacher cannot give individualized attention to each student,ā he said. āBut the computer can.
No, it cannot. Itās a statistical model, it cannot give attention to anything or anyone, what are you talking about.
Duolingoās CFO made similar comments last year, saying, āAI helps us replicate what a good teacher doesā
Did this person ever have a good teacher in their life
the company has essentially run 16,000 A/B tests over its existence
Aaaarrgh. Techās obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Ok I stop here now, thereās more, almost every paragraph contains something horrible.
Ugh. So terrible. Techās obsession with āscalingā is one of the worst things about tech.
Yeah that jumped out to me. Like human teaching has scaled fine to billions of people. It certainly has a better track record than Duolingo which provides meh study material and leads to ahem mixed learning outcomes despite being around for over a decade.
Of course thereās the subtext of ābut also weāll be able to put all those obsolete teachers out of business and make tons of money!ā
Aaaarrgh. Techās obsession with A/B testing is another one of the worst things about tech.
Being in tech I definitely see misuse of A/B testing sometimes. Sometimes a team will ignore common sense entirely but come up with metrics that measure something irrelevant. The metrics are, intentionally or not, gamed to tell them what they want to hear. They then run the (useless) numbers and use that to justify why their change was good, even in the face of intense user backlash.
One particular example that just came to mind: someone made a bad change, and lots of people complained. Eventually the complaints started to peter out. Then they claimed āsee! people just had to get used to it!ā (versus the rather more obvious possibility that nobody bothered to complain more than once).
Not really. If schools arenāt spending as much on teachers, they have more budget to spend on his slop. This way, he has a narrative for hitting the doubtlessly ridiculous future growth projections someone in his position is compelled to peddle.
Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud ā but Iād lie if I said I wasnāt worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Overheard my kids, one of them had some group project in school and the other asked who they had ended up in group with. After hearing the names, the reaction was āthey are good, none of them will use AIā.
So as always kids that actually does something in group projects doesnāt want to end up in a group with kids that wonāt contribute. Difference is just that instead of just slacking off and doing nothing they will today ācontributeā AI slop. And as always the main lesson from group projects in school is avoid ending up in a group with slackers.
Dad hi-five
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud
Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.
More seriously: itās not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way ā āitās inevitableā, āitās here to stayā, etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter ā what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).
Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud ā but Iād lie if I said I wasnāt worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population
AIās already destroying peopleās cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldnāt be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue itāll fuck up humanās capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.
(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)
Thankfully, Iāve managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:
- AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
- The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
- The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since youād have zero shot of turning a profit.
(That Iām a NEET also helps (canāt have AI bro coworkers if youāre unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)
canāt have AI bro coworkers if youāre unemployed :P
Iād certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didnāt work for a big tech company thatās gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I donāt want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.
I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense Iād be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I donāt quit for complicated reasons. Iām not that far from the breaking point, but Iām going to try to hang in for a few more years.
But yeah, Iām pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.
Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:
You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consentās off the table right from the get-go.
If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRAās essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect thatās their goal here.
new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php
also featuring our old friend Zack Davis
āLaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,ā Salamon said in an email. āNamely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.ā
āpeople commit suicide after meeting meā is a weird thing to brag about
The reader mode in Firefox shows completely different version of the article, weird. I never understood how that feature works, is there some node that contains the site supplied version of text for that mode?
Thatās the same article, it just skips title but leaves subtitle
