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.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
personal vent: at my job yesterday i had to come up with a few fake book titles/author combinations for a project. a fun little task and opportunity to hide some cheeky easter eggs. so, i came up with a few and then asked my coworkers to share in the fun. one of them though just couldn’t come up with anything at all, and eventually just resorted to “asking chat gpt”.
mind you, i work a creative job, and so do my coworkers. this is a minor thing i guess, but it just made me very sad. how could you just outsource your creative joy to some mindless word salad machine?
Man, knowing nothing else about your coworker, they sound like a completely joyless person. Coming up with fake titles for things is like, such a high fun-to-effort ratio. “Creativity and the essence of Human Experience” by Chat GPT. Boom, there’s one. “Cooking With Olive Oil” by Sam Altman. “IQ184” by Harukiezer Murakowsky. This is so fun and easy that it’s basically hack outside of situations where it is solicited.
not joyless at all. i suspect they’re creatively worn out. if you make a job out of your hobby, etc etc. combine that with habitual chatbot use and there you go. it’s overall just grim honestly. i’ll change vocation though if i’m ever forced to partake in the slop at work, thankfully so far that hasn’t happened yet.
Ah, gotcha. fwiw I wasn’t saying that to say “joyless people are bad”; burnout also tends to look like joylessness.
Is NP P or is NP not P, thats the question, by Scott Scottersons-Scottsson
Quantum Computing Since Diogenes by Karl Snarx
Sorry to ask to dissect the frog, but what’s the story behind Altman and olive oil?
Kind of a fluff story (archive) where salty’s douchiness is on full display.
I referenced it because fake book titles are throwaway jokes, you can reference something hyperspecific and not have to worry about whether or not someone will get it, because they might not even notice it at all.
God, we had so much fun doing this at my uni when creating an example DB table for an exam (only it was fake song/band combinations). Are you sure your coworker isn’t a robot themselves?
This story gives “Bezos buying random cassettes at the gas station” doesn’t it?
A full timeline on the RubyGems takeover has been put together - looks like the entire situation’s been caused by pressure from Shopify.
Who’s left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Also:
When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."
lol
I’m curious whether you or @BlueMonday1984@awful.systems are familiar with the concept of MINASWAN. The only time it’s appeared in the discussion is in one of the apologies posted by one of the Ruby Central board members, as their signoff line. Quoting a 2016 analysis of MINASWAN in which it is argued that Ruby’s central tenet is not MINASWAN, but wa (和):
Just for the record, MINASWAN is at least half true. Matz is nice. … I would not call DHH nice. … So if MINASWAN is really a basic truth about the Ruby culture, then how does DHH fit in at all? … MINASWAN is garbage. It’d be more accurate to say, “Ruby showcases the Japanese value of 和, but we are arrogant Americans, so we reduce this to a really basic American idea, harshly compressing it in the process to a state where it cannot possibly mean anything any more, instead of bothering to learn something about the outside world for once.” But MINASWAN was already a long acronym, so I guess they had to draw the line at RSTJVO和BWAAASWRTTARBAIHCIITPTASWICPMAAMIOBTLSATOWFO.
Also, I really think it’s worth understanding that Ruby is not at risk here. Ever since the release of RPG Maker XP in 2005, Ruby has been a staple of embedded scripting for game engines. Really, what we’re seeing here is the demise of Rails.
Does ruby just die now?
Part of the background to this issue is the development of
rvwhich apparently offers a future where rubygems is much less important, and some folk seem to be taking that as a threat.Whether or not the new tooling delivers, the rubygems debacle has probably helped the new project considerably.
It’d be lovely to see the correct folks build a better one with blackjack and webhooks.
Who’s left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?
Honestly, it probably will. The RubyGems takeover shattered any trust people had in the Ruby ecosystem - that’s something which is damn-nigh impossible to recover from.
Today’s related news: the tailwind css guy is a big fan of dhh and the rubygems takeover.
https://bsky.app/profile/jaredwhite.indieweb.social.ap.brid.gy/post/3lzofv4wi4yz2
I miss the days when being publicly fashy was considered poor pr, but on the other hand it does make it a lot easier to avoid their companies and products.
Tailwind is pointless, incidentally.
I have no idea about Ruby or the politics behind the scenes, but I do know who DHH is and so it seems like literally none of this would’ve happened if not for point 2. on the list?? Just like, don’t platform the rancid toxic cesspit of a man and you’re fine??
They put ‘environmental impact of AI’ on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this
kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus
They say “Luddites” as if it’s a bad thing…
“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life”
This quote is just… something.
Is the plan to literally create 8 billion podcasts in the near future? This company doesn’t think that might be a tad excessive?
Tech take from the near future: Podcast life begins at conception i.e. the instant one thinks the inside thoughts should be outside
new extreme strain of catholicism: life begins at conceptualization
Uh I think we are very quickly and dangerously approaching Dawkinsian Meme Theory
RAIDEN!
Ed: I’m sure there’s an MGS2 quote I can’t think of that would make this actually funny, but here we are.
black mirror enhancement: because the algorithms involved may present multiple likely fits to any given input, each output is also considered a conception and given due protection (even if not used)
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The spectre of Marx nods in approval
This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.
Kinda.
When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was… amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.
Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it’s just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.
At least it’s not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it’s an LLM product.
Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you’ll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027’s “predictions”.
Can’t wait for the bubble to burst. I’m really curious to see if I’ll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI…
You would hope that, if they take their job seriously, the managers who predict AI mooning, that they also write predictions for the other situations. And not just the best case scenarios.
I mean… yeah, you would hope that, wouldn’t you? And to be fair, they were selling the product beforehand as well. It’s just apparently a lot easier to sell the AI angle right now.
Yeah hope for your job that they don’t bet the company on the 2027 thing. Because that would be quite the failure of management. If they just use it as a tool for sales I get it (don’t like it, but I get it), the CEO being all in on it is worrying though, which is why I hope he has also made predictions for what if he is wrong and AI never advances anymore significantly (or even becomes a liability as a sales tool).
Realistically, the bubble bursting just means going back to pre-2025 target markets. But who knows.
For the company hopefully, but it could also turn into ‘any mention of AI gets interpreted as a bad sign’ and you need to pivot before that affects the bottom line. (clearly the pendulum is towards it being a good sign atm).
crikey. I assume the CV is in good order and kept updated on the job sites just to see what comes in.
Yeah… (Un)fortunately, everything not AI-related is pretty great in regards to the company, so I’ve decided to stick with it and hopefully still be there after the bubble bursts, unless they try to reassign me to the AI-project, then I’m gone.
take care and step carefully. there’s a moment where the stress from working for a company with goals that counter your personal ethics is going to be hard to bear, and the worst thing you can do then is to change your value system to reduce the cognitive dissonance.
Thanks, I appreciate the concern. Luckily, the entire core dev team is very critical/cynical about AI, it’s not just me, everyone I directly work with also wants to build the product for its intended purposes, not for AI-use. I think that somewhat lessens the pressure to go with the narrative.
Plus, I can’t see that happening while participating in discussions on this lemmy instance :D
In any case, thank you for the sound advice,
Mawhrin-SkelFlere-Imsaho!
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
[…] Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Cloudflare sponsors Ladybird and Omarchy, techfash workfare
TIL about Omarchy.
Of course it uses Hyprland. Of course the demo video on the website shows using Grok in it.
Still can’t believe that choosing a Linux distribution now involves decision-making factors like “what’s their take on fascism”. But I guess the real problem is that such questions weren’t asked for way too long before.
Remind me: why is Hyprland bad? I don’t doubt it is, I just need it to add to my mental list of stuff to avoid.
https://drewdevault.com/2023/09/17/Hyprland-toxicity.html
tl;dr: incredibly toxic transphobic community enabled by the devs
why the hell are they sponsoring omarchy
how is a customized hyprland config “helping the open web”Maybe more on-purpose obscurantism ala Urbit?
Damn, I was kinda hoping the Ladybird guy wouldn’t turn out awful but nah, can’t have shit in IT.
has there been more indication of him being a bit fashy since that one github issue? haven’t been following it that much.
he keeps hanging out with fascists and receiving money from organizations that support fascists and something about his personal brand in interviews being wearing “Big Tech is gangstalking me” t-shirts also very much rubs me the wrong way
ladybird is a ridiculously unserious project (last I heard they were considering a rewrite in Swift and ignoring everyone who told them why that’s a terrible idea, maybe they’ve given up on that by now) and I frankly have no idea why it’s being hyped over Servo as an independent browser project other than a general willingness in tech to play ball with weird little fascists
e: also this lobste.rs subthread
fucking hell. but in hindsight, the vibes were always just a little bit off in his videos. guess servo is the only hope for a decent browser free from corporate/technofascist garbage.
nice, good collection of links, will help next time I need to find it. couple weeks ago I mentioned it on masto and I had someone Very Huffily reply to me (a situation I resolved by simply blocking them, gfy with that nonsense)
The lobsters thread linked in a sibling comment has more examples, but here’s him eulogizing Charlie Kirk in a nazi bar https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1966456391146606806
as a bonus here he does a “i’m not usually political, but the left is evil” https://nitter.net/awesomekling/status/1967493595545682220 great, just great
real fucking weird tweet from ronacher there too
I never got much of a sense that Charlie would be open to have his own mind changed
No way, really? Are you really doubting the professional nazi troll’s desire to have his convictions challenged through good faith dialogue?
no, you see, exchange of opinions with charlie kirk was supposed to work like this: you get in with your opinion and leave with his
It is well known that the Marketplace Of Ideas is Zero Sum
I was hoping it was meant as a trollish sort of post (because anybody who didn’t realize that soon after ~2016 has not paid any attention), but then he did a bothsides. Really doing a ‘lets be open to the idea of gay people being stoned (and that isn’t even the correct quote, it is put to death, leviticus is specific (it also seems to only be about people in Israel, or else the land will vomit you out, and old testament. Kirk wasn’t even a good bible scholar). and trans people being eradicated’.
dunno, I seem to recall I’ve seen a couple other stinkers from ronacher lately. dude’s also full on the LLM bandwagon iirc
probably need to keep a notes file
Red site’s having a normal one about it
Usual suspects weighing in.
I mean, of course they are. Perfect culture fit, both projects.
They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.
https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/
Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.
legal threats?
Doubt that is legal, but yeah good luck suing Thiel over an event like this and keeping a job. Stuff is so fucked. Remember when hackers were proud to leak this stuff, like how people worked together to go after scientology.
Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(
Ted Chiang rules.
it would be very funny if Rocco Basilico’s legacy was that his name bore resemblance to Roko Basilisk and nothing else
image desc
Quote tweet: “my name is rokos basilisk and i’m making artificial intelligence that you put on your body”
Quoted tweet: an embedded article platforming Meta’s Chief Wearables Officer named “Rocco Basilico”
My name is Rocco Pa’perclip Basilico Yudkowski Way…
Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y’know, kinda boring.
So Science did a study.
ChatGPT failed.
Why? It got stuff wrong. “Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed.” https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/can-chatgpt-help-science-writers
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Okay, let’s see what the dumbshits are trying to sell this time
(This took longer than I’d liked, because copy-paste is pretty laggy on Cloudflare’s shit-ass page)
Built for the rise of agents and machines, NET Dollar will enable seamless, automated transactions without human intervention.
“Agents” are automatic data breach machines, letting them repeat that time they stole vibe-coders’ crypto on a larger scale is a terrible idea
The rise of autonomous agents and connected devices is creating a new economic paradigm
Autonomous agents don’t exist, and the only “new economic paradigm” being made is one where tech is completely unmoored from reality
These systems need a reliable medium of exchange that can handle high-frequency, automated transactions without human intervention.
See my previous point
Rules, triggers, and workflows can be embedded directly into payments, making them smarter and adaptable.
Went so well for Wolf Game, didn’t it?
NET Dollar will work across networks and ecosystems, enabling frictionless, global commerce.
And by “frictionless, global commerce”, I presume they mean “sanctions evasion and ransomware”
Every coin will be fully collateralized by a U.S. dollar, ensuring transparency, reliability, and price stability.
NET Dollar will be made available soon.
How about never.
Cloudflare is about to get really familiar with North Koreans.
Starting this Stubsack off with Brian Merchant’s newest article: The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing
House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR’d PDF; I’ll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:
Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)
Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?
Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]
From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel’s name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.
Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon
Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn’t Epstein’s only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon’s not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment’s notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein’s Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn’t quite tell us who this guest is, but it can’t be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a ‘g’ and ‘j’/‘q’, but Bannon’s name doesn’t have any descenders.
Also Prince Andrew’s in there, I guess?
Any of the big Rationalists get mentioned yet?
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This week’s southpark makes fun of prediction markets! Hanson and the rationalists can be proud their idea has gone mainstream enough to be made fun of. The episode actually does a good job highlighting some of the issues with the whole concept: the twisted incentives and insider trading and the way it fails to actually create good predictions (as opposed to just getting vibes and degenerate gambling).
