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.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 month ago

      Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

      I’m dead. At least the Rust Evangelism Strike Force finally got to have their theocracy

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    20·
    1 month ago

    from this post (archive)

    App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

    aww, does the widdle app’s business model collapse completely once it can’t harvest data? how sad

    this reinforces a suspicion that I’ve had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it’s an all or nothing choice and they don’t know the full impact (because it’s intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

    • Ruby Jones@smutlandia.com
      9·
      1 month ago

      @blakestacey Super depressed that people were using the rubbish plagiarism machines to edit Wikipedia anyway. I don’t understand the point of contributing if you don’t think *you* have anything to contribute without that garbage.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        1 month ago

        There are the weirdest people who make ‘content’ out there. For example, I saw a ‘how to start the game’ joke guide on steam, so I went to their page to block them (to see if this also blocks the guides from popping up, doesn’t seem so) and they had made hundreds of these guides, all just copy pasted shit. And there were more people doing the exact same thing. Bizarre shit. (Prob related to the thing where you can give people stickers, gamification was a mistake).

    • Resuna@ohai.social
      7·
      1 month ago

      @blakestacey

      I am disappoint.

      “The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.”

  • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    1 month ago

    I’m just thinking about all the reply guys that come here defending autoplag, specifically with this idea:

    “GPT is great when I want to turn a list of bullet points into an eloquent email”

    Hey, you butts, just send the bullet points! What are you, a high schooler? Nobody has time for essays, much less autoplagged slop.

    • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      1 month ago

      No no no it’s fine! You get the word shuffler to deshuffle the—eloquently—shuffled paragraphs back into nice and tidy bullet points. And I have an idea! You could get an LLM to add metadata to the email to preserve the original bullet points, so the recipient LLM has extra interpolation room to choose to ignore the original list, but keep the—much more correct and eloquent, and with much better emphasis—hallucinated ones.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    1 month ago

    As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

    This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

    This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 month ago

      I have a lot of time for nostalgia about older versions of the web, but it really ticks me off when people who actively participated in making the web worse start to indulge in nostalgia about the web. Doesn’t Yarvin get a lot of money from Peter Thiel?

      There were women and people of colour on the old web, and feminists and radical anti-racists too - they were just outnumbered and outgunned. One of the earliest projects listed on the cyberfeminism index are VNS Matrix, who were “corrupting the discourse” way back in 1991.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 month ago

        To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 month ago

      why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest

      I’m thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.

      I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it’s the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest)

      Because they think you live in a real country, not the USA.

      old internet

      I wonder for how many people this is a reactionary impulse, wanting back to the ‘old internet’ they didn’t actually participate in. At least in modern days the flamewar posts are quite limited in length, in the old days they could reach novel sizes. Anyway sure we should go back to the old internet, where suddenly your whole university had no internet because there was a dos attack on the network to force a netsplit on an a random irc channel.

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    1 month ago

    Today in “Promptfondler fucks around and finds out.”

    So I’m guessing what happened here is that the statistically average terminal session doesn’t end after opening an SSH connection, and the LLM doesn’t actually understand what it’s doing or when to stop, especially when it’s being promoted with the output of whatever it last commanded.

    Shlegeris said he uses his AI agent all the time for basic system administration tasks that he doesn’t remember how to do on his own, such as installing certain bits of software and configuring security settings.

    Emphasis added.

    • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      1 month ago

      “I only had this problem because I was very reckless,” he continued, "partially because I think it’s interesting to explore the potential downsides of this type of automation. If I had given better instructions to my agent, e.g. telling it ‘when you’ve finished the task you were assigned, stop taking actions,’ I wouldn’t have had this problem.

      just instruct it “be sentient” and you’re good, why don’t these tech CEOs undersand the full potential of this limitless technology?

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 month ago

      so I snipped the prompt from the log, and:

      ❯ pbpaste| wc -c
    2063

      wow, so efficient! I’m so glad that we have this wonderful new technology where you can write 2kb of text to send to an api to spend massive amounts of compute to get back an operation for doing the irredeemably difficult systems task of initiating an ssh connection

      these fucking people

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        1 month ago

        Assistant: I apologize for the confusion. It seems that the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet is not the correct one for your network. Let’s try to determine your network configuration. We can do this by checking your IP address and subnet mask:

        there are multiple really bad and dumb things in that log, but this really made me lol (the IPs in question are definitely in that subnet)

        if it were me, I’d be fucking embarrassed to publish something like this as anything but a talk in the spirit of wat. but the promptfondlers don’t seem to have that awareness

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            1 month ago

            it’s a classic

            similarly, Mickens talks. if you haven’t ever seen ‘em, that’s your next todo

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          9·
          1 month ago

          But playing spicy mad-libs with your personal computers for lols is critical AI safety research! This advances the state of the art of copy pasting terminal commands without understanding them!

          I also appreciated The Register throwing shade at their linux sysadmin skills:

          Yes, we recommend focusing on fixing the Grub bootloader configuration rather than a reinstall.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      1·
      29 days ago

      OMG. This is borderline unhinged behaviour. Yeah, let’s just give root permission to an LLM and let it go nuts in prod. What could possibly go wrong?

  • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
    14·
    1 month ago

    Metal music festival Shell Shock II loses headliner, multiple bands after announcing Kyle Rittenhouse as guest

    Ex-headliners Evergreen Terrace: “Even after they offered to pull Kyle from the event, we discovered several associated entities that we simply do not agree with”

    the new headliner will be uh a Slipknot covers band

    organisers: “We have been silent. But we are prepping. The liberal mob attempted to destroy Shell Shock. But we will not allow it. This is now about more than a concert. This is a war of ideology.” yeah you have a great show guys

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      Not a lawyer, but wouldn’t that be something her estate could kick up some legal dust about? That’s two dozen kind of fucked up.

  • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    1 month ago

    My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

    See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

    I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      1 month ago

      They’re from Germany and made the rounds on the news here a few years back. They’re famous for basically donating all their profits to ecological projects, mostly for planting trees. These projects are publicly visible and auditable, so this at least isn’t bullshit.

      Under the hood they’re just another Bing wrapper (like DuckDuckGo).

      I actually kinda liked the project until they started adding a chatbot some months back. It was just such a weird decision because it has no benefits and is actively against their mission. Their reason for adding it was “user demand” which is the same bullshit Proton spewed and I don’t believe it.

      This green mode crap sounds really whack, lol. So I really wonder what’s up with that. I gotta admit that I thought they were really in it because they believed in their ecological idea (or at least their marketing did a great job convincing me) so this feels super weird.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      1 month ago

      That is a good username. Also very scummy business practices. I have a quite big dislike for people who pull that kind of shit.

      • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        1 month ago

        Thanks! I thought it shows up on here too. Anyway, you can find me on all the places with that username

    • Steve@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      I have sent an email to their press enquiries contact asking for more information, but I don’t know if I have the “press” clout to warrant a response (I know I don’t)

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    1 month ago

    from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

    and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

    nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

    oh, what’s that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

    • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      29 days ago

      Aren’t you supposed to try to hide your psychopathic instincts? I wonder if he’s knowingly bullshitting or if he’s truly gotten high on his own supply.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      29 days ago

      You know, when Samuel L Jackson decided that the best approach to climate change was to kill billions of poor people rather than ask the rich to give up any privileges in Kingsman it was more blatantly evil but appreciably less dumb than this. Very similar wavelength though.