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 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 so 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.)
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
Iāll start with this gem
This one is just eternally ???!!!
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasnāt written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasnāt good TV or even good animation. There wasnāt even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
- An MLM hypnotizes people into following a cult led by Wally
- Dilbert and a security guard play prince-and-the-pauper
Thatās it! He usually wasnāt allowed to write alone. Iām not sure if weāll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asokās name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. Iām not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
as a youth Iād acquired this at some point and I recall some fondness about some of the things, largely in the novelty sense (in that they worked āwithā the desktop, had the āboss keyā, etc) - and I suspect that in turn was largely because it was my first run-in with all of those things
later on (skipping ahead, like, ~22y or something), the more I learned about the guy, the harder I never wanted to be in a room as him
may he rest in ever-refreshed piss
Okay this takes the cake wtf
ok if I saw āevery male encounter is implied violenceā tweeted from an anonymous account Iād see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily itās just weird brainrot from adams here
One more:
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
I knew there was somethinā not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation
In retrospect itās pretty obvious this was central to his character: he couldnāt accept he got hella lucky with dilbert happening to hit pop culture square in the zeitgeist, so he had to adjust his worldview into him being a master wizard that can bend reality to his will, and also everyone else is really stupid for not doing so too, except, it turned out, Trump.
From what I gather thereās also a lot of the rationalist high intelligence is being able to manipulate others bordering on mind control ethos in his fiction writing,
itās not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adamsās inspiration for the product was that ādiet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.ā He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called āthe blue jeans of foodā.
Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Aliceās anger isnāt a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
Itās the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy ā who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! ā but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider ātruth-teller.ā
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didnāt really want that anyway. Iāve been reading through JoJoās Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: āWhy be #1 when you can be #2?ā
I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others
If COVID made you a bad person ā it didnāt, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened ā a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress ā then no, Iām sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, itās just a mask-off moment
@sansruse @V0ldek You left out the best part! š
Adams himself noted, ā[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.ā[63] The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.[64]
The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.
Jesus christ thatās a murder
@sansruse My jaw genuinely dropped
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Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didnāt mention that part for some reason.
JWZ: The Dilbert Hole
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
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one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. iāll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought āthatās coolā and now my reaction is āgreat, gotta see if an llm was usedā
everything feels gloomy.
Iām gonna leave here my idea, that an essential aspect of why GenAI is bad is that it is designed to extrude media that fits common human communication channels. This makes it perfect to choke out human-to-human communication over those channels, preventing knowledge exchange and social connection.
I am reminded of Val Packettās lobsters comment I read the other day:
The āAIā companies are DDoSing reality itself.
They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be āthe information superhighwayā with slop, so their customers DDoS everyoneās attention. Also bosses get to āautomate awayā any jobs where the personās output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. Thatās the DDoS against everyoneās human rights and against life itself.
Itās like carbon monoxide binding to hemoglobin.
ooh, thatās brilliant
seeing the furious reactions to shaming of the confabulation machine promoters, i can only conclude the shaming works.
ooh, whereās the (new?) spice? Iāve been under multiple rocks
nothing formal, but the backlash to criticism is becoming absolutely disproportionate: for example, the person who made the list of slopware, kat marchƔn, was bullied off the social media by the slop merchants. this looks eerily similar to the right-wing braying about cultural war, where they call harassment any critique of their positions, and call a reasonable critique any harassment they do themselves.
(and just very recently the always very nice CTO and co-founder of the oxide company, a major rust shop, decided that shaming the promoters of the confabulation machines is not to be done at the company.)
you will be pleased to know that self and i are responding
see https://awful.systems/post/6913182 we need a name
Itās so ironic how they claimed the list was harassment, after they harassed the person who made it away from open-source.
kat marchƔn goes by she/they fwiw.
OT: Iām adopting two rescue kittens, one is pretty much a go but its proving trickier to get a companion (hoping the current application works out today). Part of me feels guilty for doing this so fast after what happened, but I kinda need it to keep me from doing anything stupid.
Donāt feel bad, the faster you rescue the cat the better it is for them! Iām sure your cat wouldnāt mind you making two kitties happy with a forever-home :)
Hey youāre doing the little feller a solid. please be kind to yourself!
We had to do the same when my wifeās ESA cat of nearly 20 years passed away a couple years back. The couple of months we waited before getting our new kittens was pretty fucking dark. Fingers crossed for you, friend.
OT: going to pick up a tiny black foster kitten (high energy) later this weekā¦but yesterday I saw the pound had a flame point siamese kitten of all things, and heās now running around my condo.
Cat tax:
What a great creature. Big ears, for hearing people say stupid things about AI.
well thatās a lovely furball :) congratulations on finding a new buddy! got a name?
Pound named him Waffle Fry, I was thinking just Waffle but I;m still looking tbh.
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process and I think Iām starting to have visions of teddy k
thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process
ā¦I donāt want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah Iām going through it ngl
Skynetās backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: āMuskās AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth saysā.
The article doesnāt provide much more other than exactly what youād expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: āmake all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and componentā.
Me as a kid: āhow could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!ā
Me now: āOh. Yeah. That checks outā
when I saw that theyād rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please noā¦
https://theasterisk.substack.com/p/reflecting-on-a-few-very-very-strange
Cross posting from reddit but hereās TPOT/GHB/CNC stuff
Setting the stage: I had become a social media personality on Clubhouse
Iām sorry.
What I remember is that the organizers said something like āIām sorry that happened to youā, and while speaking I was interrupted by someone talking about the plight that autistic men face while dating.
Vibecamp: Itās the Scott Aaronson comment section, but in person.
This is genuinely horrifying throughout. It reinforces my conviction that I donāt really want to know or gossip about the details of these peoplesā lives, I want to know the barest details of who they are so that I can set firm social boundaries against them.
A quote the author offers, that stands out to me:
A man who is considered a TPOT āelderā:
TPOT isnāt misogynist but itās made up of men and women who prefer the company of men. itās a male space with male norms.
this makes it barely tolerable for the few girlsā girls who wander in here. they end up either deactivating, going private, or venting about how men suck.
Iād never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, theyāre never going to grow up.
I donāt wish to belittle the authorās suffering, but I do hope she is able to reconsider her participation in these scenes where hierarchy, contrived masculinity, and financial standing (or the ability to generate financial gain for others!) are the signifiers of individual participantsā worth.
Iād never been particularly ardent about believing it, but this right here is firm evidence to me that existing in a rigid gender binary is mental and spiritual poison. Whoever this person is, theyāre never going to grow up.
Honestly i feel like my role in many of my friendships is simply telling people that they donāt have to follow these prescriptions and are allowed to do things outside of them, and that following these prescriptions isnāt some magic pill that is going to fix their lives, and is more likely a poison. So yeah if you started ardently believing that, I would not be opposed.
These people are bitter and sad because they are trying to perform in hypermasculine roles that only exist as fiction in marketing and propaganda. Iām bitter and sad because:
- these people exist
- i have to acknowledge that part of their ignorance is sustained by capitalist pressure and isnāt their fault
- i also have to acknowledge that these people are ruining the world and still need to be destroyed because they never show signs that they can be rehabilitated
āUā for āyouā was when I became confident who āNinaā was. The blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but canāt make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like āwhat is Hereticon?ā for granted and is still into crypto.
She links someone called Sonia Joseph who mentions āthe consensual non-consensual (cnc) sex parties and heavy LSD use of some elite AI researchers ā¦ leads (sic) to some of the most coercive and fucked up social dynamics that I have ever seen.ā Joseph says she is Canadian but worked in the Bay Area tech scene. Cursed phrase: agi cnc sex parties
I have never heard of a wing of these people in Canada. There are a few Effective Altruists in Toronto but I donāt know if they are the LessWrong kind or the bednet kind. I thought this was basically a US and Oxford scene (plus Jaan Tallinn).
The Substack and a Rationalist web magazine are both called Asterisk.
I think theres a EA presence at the all the big universities now. Theres a rationalist meet up in Manitoba but nothing here thank god.
I noticed Sonia during the initial media coverage but didnāt know what to make of her. Theres another person on twitter alleging abuse at Aellaās cnc parties, I can dig them up at lunch if you want.
not to make light of abuse but I do just want to entertain the alternate world where people are holding CNC (computer numerical control) parties. I imagine theyād have a lot of caliper talk but since it isnāt about skull measurement itās fine
That would be a much better world (btw ironworkers are great if you ever get to use one).
Manifesting a more ironworker forward 2026 bless ššš
Transcribing (the nested blockquote is a self-quote-tweet):
Some day Iāll be able to write about my experience with Aellaās organizing/friend group who used their community power to slander me, bully me and ruin my life simply bc I told the truth and patiently sought understanding:
Idk what youāre referring to but she/RMN team, when I brought up concern about my abuser, strung me along for months promising a conversation, then ultimately banned me, publicly slandered/victim blamed me, and continue to invite my abuser and his enablers to their events.
Note: after months being strung along w no clear answers/dialogue, one RMN organizer told me I was disinvited bc theyre ārisk averseā w who gets invited.
Risk averse aboutā¦ someone EXPERIENCING abuse/CVs/retaliation (not reporting it), but not about the ppl actually doing it.
I hope they understand how thatās just not how you should be risk averse with your eventsā¦ After experiencing the RMN team participation in the retaliation (again, all i did was talk about things that happened n correct lies), of course my disappointment & concern grew.
That āHereticonā link looks broken; I think it should point to this RationalWiki page.
It looks like this site requites
https://orhttp;//to recognize a link as an external link, otherwise it prependsawful.systems/and treats it as an internal link
he blogger feels like yet another person who is caught up in intersecting subcultures of bad people but canāt make herself leave. She takes a lot of deep lore like āwhat is Hereticon?ā for granted and is still into crypto.
I missed that as I was reading, but yeah, the author has pretty progressive language, but totally fails to note all the other angles along which rational adjacent spaces are bad news, even though she is, as you note, deep enough into the space she should have seen a lot of it mask-off at this point.
This article genuinely made me furious on this womanās behalf. It isnāt like most scenes or spaces are great at handling sexual violence, but in most spaces people would not accuse you of trying to silence and hurt men by saying you were groped!
OT: I really appreciated the things you guys said last thread. It helped a lot.
<3
Ed Zitron is now predicting an earth-shattering bubble pop: https://www.wheresyoured.at/dot-com-bubble/ so in other words just another weekday.
Even if this was just like the dot com bubble, things would be absolutely fucking catastrophic ā the NASDAQ dropped 78% from its peak in March 2000 ā but due to the incredible ignorance of both the private and public power brokers of the tech industry, I expect consequences that range from calamitous to catastrophic, dependent almost entirely on how long the bubble takes to burst, and how willing the SEC is to greenlight an IPO.
I am someone who does not understand the economy. Both in that itās behaved irrationally for my entire life, and in that I have better things to do than learn how stonks work. So I have no idea how credible this is.
But it feels credible to the lizard brain part of me yāknow? The market crashed a lot during covid, and an economy propped up by nvidia cards feelsā¦ worse.
Personally speaking: part of me is really tempted to take a bunch of my stonks to pay down most of my mortgage so it doesnāt act like an albatross around my neck (I mean Iām also going to try moving abroad again in a year or two and would prefer not to be underwater on my fantastically expensive silicon valley house at that time lol).
My problem with this is that I donāt know what the actual spark for collapse would be. Like, we all know this is unsustainable vaporware, but that doesnāt seem to affect the market at all. So when does this collapse? People have been talking about the collapse for two years now. Is there anything that prevents the market from just remaining insane forever and ever in perpetuity?
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain liquid (a classic quote typically gifted anyone who wants to ātime the marketā, but generally very applicable to anyone these days)
I donāt (directly) have a financial horse in this, Iām just afraid the market can remain irrational so long my brain becomes fucking liquid
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Thatās exactly what I mean when I say I donāt understand the stock market.
Likeā¦ how is Tesla stock a thing? I donāt understand it.
how is Tesla stock a thing?
Edward Niedermeyer write a book to answer that very question (cheating on taxes + organize gangs of invested fanboys who suppress negative news online)
Stock markets in the rest of the developed world seem less bubbly than the US market.
Because theyāll make humanoid robots that will conquer the world. At least thatās the current story.
Considering how Musks businesses are being prepped up by just his force of personality and not any real proper business practices Iām not sure we should belief any predictions of doom. See also how cryptocurrencies are still a thing, and just the price of gold (which doesnāt really make sense re the actual practical usage of gold (the store of value in bad times thing doesnt really make sense to me, who is gonna buy your gold when the economy crashes? Fucking Mansa Musa?).
I know a bit more about stocks and businesses (both due to education, a minor talent in it, and learning some of it for shadowrun dm purposes (yeah im a big nerd)) and all this doesnt make any real sense to me re the economic/business fundamentals.
We should be careful to not turn into zero hedge re our predictions of the bubble popping (āIt has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessionsā quote from rationalwiki), even of we all agree it is a huge bubble, and I share the same feeling that he is right on this. (See also how the ai craze is destroying viable supply businesses like the ram stuff (and more parts soon to come if the stories are correct))
We live in stupid times, and a very large amount of blame should prob fall on silicon valley, with the ipo offloading of bags bullshit. (And their libertarianism for others socialism for us stuff (see the bank which was falling over which turned them all into statists))
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads somewhere I donāt want to go. Weāre drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent ā where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you donāt control, canāt inspect, and didnāt shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and itās ponderously flabby!
Over on Lobsters, Simon Willison and I have made predictions for bragging rights, not cash. By July 10th, Simon predicts that there will be at least two sophisticated open-source libraries produced via vibecoding. Meanwhile, I predict that there will be five-to-thirty deaths from chatbot psychosis. Copy-pasting my sneer:
How will we get two new open-source libraries implementing sophisticated concepts? Will we sacrifice 5-30 minds to the ELIZA effect? Could we not inspire two teams of university students and give them pizza for two weekends instead?
Willison:
I havenāt reviewed a single line of code it wrote but I clicked around and it seems to do the right things.
Could not waterboard that out of me, etc.
Well to be fair, he think your estimate is too low :( (as do i)
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
So pleased that theyre not budging!
A fun little software exercise with no real world uses at all: https://drewmayo.com/1000-words/about.html
Turns out that if you stuff the right shaped bytes into png image tEXt chunks (which donāt get compressed), the base64 encoded form of that image has sections that look like human readable text.
What are the implications?
Nothing! This was just for fun after a discussion with a colleague whether it might be even possible to make base64 blobs look readable. Thereās certainly no poorly coded systems out there which might be hooked up to read emails or webpages and interpret any text they see as information.
No siree Iām sure everyone is keeping the attachments and the content well and truly isolated from each other and this couldnāt possibly do anything other than be a fun proof of concept and excuse for me to play with wasm.
Iām apparently too
out of coffeedumb to properly get the joke. Whatās the implications if some system parses the PNG text chunks in the same way it does the body of the email?think LLM agentic software.
Ah, makes sense. My mind was going more towards actual security exploits, butā¦ yeah. Makes sense.
Anyways, thank you Flere-Imsaho, I will never not love seeing your username on here.
I mean, at the rate the chucklefucks are going, a number of these things are actual security exploits
that it happens/works for a completely unhinged reason is almost a separate evaluation dimension in scoring
a number of these things are actual security exploits
yes, sure, but in the sense of āsocial engineering the slopbotā, not āthereās a vulnerability in [x] which does not apply proper sanitation to non-body text content before evaluating itā
It is insane that people saw that social engineering is the number one security issue and were like ābut what if we automated that?ā
