Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th April 2025
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...)
Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.
For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot
It's not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. [...] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.
2 out of 19 found this helpful
Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.
I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)
While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).
The heading means "Bitcoin could protect from inflation". If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!
Not strictly related to our normal fare, but it is on a website. HHS has been stepping up their search for snitches on people who provide gender-affirming care to trans kids. I don't know exactly what they're going to do with those reports, but it's feeling real bleak.
I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Sam Altman makes a great argument for being polite to your chatbot!
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it's actively reducing the overall harm that it can do.
Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience
Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
TIL Richard fucking Hanania is a Rationalist, at least according to this excrescence from LW
The left-wing monoculture catastrophically damaged institutional integrity when public-health officials lied during the pandemic and when bureaucrats used threats and intimidation to censor speech on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere—in the long-term this could move the country toward the draconian censorship regimes, restrictions on political opposition, and unresponsiveness to public opinion that we see today in England, France, and Germany.[1]
Yeah I'm sure trying to dictate to Harvard who they can hire and what courses they can teach is not leading to a "draconian censorship regime"
[1] to be clear this is attributed to Richard Ngo, not Hanania
404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered
It's a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don't have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.
I really didn't think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, "an insult to life itself".
Today in relevant skeets:
transcript
Skeet: If you can clock who this is meant to be instantly you are on the computer the perfect amount. You’re doing fine don’t even worry about it.
Quoted skeet: 'Why are high fertility people always so weird?' A weekend with the pronatalists
Image: Egghead Jr. and Miss Prissy from Looney Tunes Foghorn Leghorn shorts.
previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions
Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you're forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.
Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.
So they asked support.
And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy
One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to 'mimic human responses'
haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some
Posting this as a stub because of reasons
- I don't want to do the research on this
- This was pulled from the front page of reddit
- Connecting these two things is largely tabloid speculation, but funny enough for a stub.
X Is Ditching DMs Hours After News of Musk Messaging Women About Impregnating Them Breaks
New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:
I got a spam message with a phishing link.... Via Github? Seriously? Are we really doing this?
Not a completely unusual comment.... From the URL it was very obvious that this was a phishing link though. Curiosity got the better of me. The site shows you a "cloudflare" captcha. OK, let's click the checkbox. The usual loading animation starts, then this is shown:
Yeah ok, right....
I'm actually a bit impressed with this, these captchas are so common, I didn't even really think about checking the box. But of course, that interaction means the browser will allow the site to add something to your clipboard.
But like.... Why distribute it via Github? I cannot think of a worse audience to try and con into "paste something random into your windows console". Am I just being naive here? Is this something common I somehow never experienced before?
LessWronger puts in the work and determines that LLMs can't spacially vizualize for shit, comments are like "well you're prompting it wrong" (paraphrased) as well as "why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they're doing os their work can be automated"
The article itself is worth reading for some insights in the challenges of using current "AI" (LLMs) to work in the real world.
"In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.”", if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn't exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.
Source "Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies", Archive
Finally a use case for "AI": defrauding community colleges.
sigh
article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children
features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesn’t qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps
you will never guess which company hired oswald mosely's grandson
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/palantir-boss-interview-keir-starmer-gets-ai
No more CVEs, so I guess that means no more vulnerabilities, the computer security crisis is solved, who knew it would be that easy!
Infamous Dr Who "big name fan" Ian Levine is using generative AI to recreate lost episodes of the show. This got some mainstream press coverage and fans seem miffed.
Noted sex pest Andrew Cuomo wants to run for Mayor in New York, and he might actually have a chance given the incumbent Democratic candidate is corruption magnet Eric Adams. Housing is a big issue in New York, so what's Cuomo's plan? Well, his plan is to use chat gpt to write his plan.
Angry New York Democrats were using the slogan DREAM meaning Don't Rank Eric Adams for Mayor. It was then amended to Don't Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and amended again to Don't Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI's threat to the entire tech industry
New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble's burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.
Its not the first piece I've seen about the bubble's potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.
JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don't wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [...]
"Inference Magazine," a substack written by a young feller named "Wiseman" who, in the most recent article, says "nuh-uh, you're the parrot" to the work of Dr. Bender and co (and the rest of humanity, by extension).
https://inferencemagazine.substack.com/
The hackernews thread is a real Bad Philosophy turkey shoot:
I was reminded of Risky Business and how some of the cybersecurity is sometimes relevant to this sub, which reminded me they talked about this Cryptocurrency people being actually rubber hosed
Serious question: what are people's specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (I've seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but I'm not sure about specifics...)
For example... I've seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their "services" at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs don't actually drop that much if any?
Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe coding... but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesn't go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.
ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem
Quick post: bad news here in Europe, Meta allowed to scrape facebook/instagram. bad source (just a screenshot isn't great as a source)
COMMERCIAL NOTICE: Pivot to AI now has T-shirts! yeah, I sorted out Redbubble. Also does mugs and stuff. All proceeds go to a worthy cause, i.e. me.
this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025
the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news
i expect this one to be more of the same
