Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 2025
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th May 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.)
I'm gonna do something now that prob isn't that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I'm quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesn't that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.
A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don't like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA's judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I'll let Dr. Abeba Birhane's horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
Today’s man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.
(two rainbow stickers labelled “pride@sap”, with one saying “I support equality by embracing responsible ai” and the other saying “I advocate for inclusion through ai”)
Don’t have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148
everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (I'm already half assuming they don't have proper backups).
E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, don't go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.
Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy that’s developed
"accenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rights"
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
"accenture were desperately looking to find someone who'd take on the deal for the GPUs they'd bought, and thank fuck they found telstra"
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it won't
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
"and the wider industry" ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
“I always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. It’s like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,” said Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer.
“We need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So that’s what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.”
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade would've been jealous
There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3
Tante on the hype term 'agentic AI'
The latest in chatbot "assisted" legal filings. This time courtesy of an Anthropic's lawyers and a data scientist, who tragically can't afford software that supports formatting legal citations and have to rely on Clippy instead: https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-filing-citation-error
After the Latham & Watkins team identified the source as potential additional support for Ms. Chen’s testimony, I asked Claude.ai to provide a properly formatted legal citation for that source using the link to the correct article. Unfortunately, although providing the correct publication title, publication year, and link to the provided source, the returned citation included an inaccurate title and incorrect authors. Our manual citation check did not catch that error. Our citation check also missed additional wording errors introduced in the citations during the formatting process using Claude.ai.
Don't get high on your own AI as they say.
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
In somewhat lighter news, Fortnite added Darth Vader to the game, and gave him a "conversational AI" to let him talk to players in the voice of James Earl Jones (who I just discovered died last year).
To nobody's surprise, gamers have already gotten the AI Vader swearing and yelling slurs.
Saw a six day old post on linkedin that I’ll spare you all the exact text of. Basically it goes like this:
“Claude’s base system prompt got leaked! If you’re a prompt fondler, you should read it and get better at prompt fondling!”
The prompt clocks in at just over 16k words (as counted by the first tool that popped up when I searched “word count url”). Imagine reading 16k words of verbose guidelines for a machine to make your autoplag slightly more claude shaped than, idk, chatgpt shaped.
LWer suggests people who believe in AI doom make more efforts to become (internet) famous. Apparently not bombing on Lex Fridman's snoozecast, like Yud did, is the baseline.
The community awards the post one measly net karma point, and the lone commenter scoffs at the idea of trying to convince the low-IQ masses to the cause. In their defense, Vanguardism has been tried before with some success.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qcKcWEosghwXMLAx9/doomers-should-try-much-harder-to-get-famous
if you saw that post making its rounds in the more susceptible parts of tech mastodon about how AI’s energy use isn’t that bad actually, here’s an excellent post tearing into it. predictably, the original post used a bunch of LWer tricks to replace numbers with vibes in an effort to minimize the damage being done by the slop machines currently being powered by such things as 35 illegal gas turbines, coal, and bespoke nuclear plants, with plans on the table to quickly renovate old nuclear plants to meet the energy demand. but sure, I’m certain that can be ignored because hey look over your shoulder is that AGI in a funny hat?
Not sure if satire. https://carebestie.com/
Beff back at it again threatening his doxxer. Nitter link
New piece from Brian Merchant: De-democratizing AI, which is primarily about the GOP's attempt to ban regulations on AI, but also touches on the naked greed and lust for power at the core of the AI bubble.
EDIT: Also, that title's pretty clever
Satya Nadella: "I'm an email typist."
Grand Inquisitor: "HE ADMITS IT!"
https://bsky.app/profile/reckless.bsky.social/post/3lpazsmm7js2s
Quick update on the Conover Catastrophe: the man's making an attempt to recover his dignity:
More of a notedump than a sneer. I have been saying every now and then that there was research and stuff showing that LLMs require exponentially more effort for linear improvements. This is post by Iris van Rooij (Professor of Computational Cognitive Science) mentions something like that (I said something different, but The intractability proof/Ingenia theorem might be useful to look into): https://bsky.app/profile/irisvanrooij.bsky.social/post/3lpe5uuvlhk2c
Recently stumbled upon an anti-AI mutual aid/activism group that's being set up, I suspect some of you will be interested.
Local war profiteer goes on podcast to pitch an unaccountable fortress-state around active black site (what I assume is to do Little St James-type activities under the pretext of continued Yankee meddling)
Link to Xitter here (quoted within a delicious sneer to boot)
nazi bar owner tinkers with techfash bot trying to vibecode a nazi service on nazi network and gets his crypto stolen https://awful.systems/post/4364989
(this fucker is responsible for soapbox, which is frontend used almost invariably by nazi-packed pleroma instances. among other crimes of similar nature)
So I have two laser printers, a cute little HP one and an old Lexmark. The former works mostly OK, but requires fiddling* to get it working on Linux, and prints things smaller than their actual size. The latter is also good enough to be useful, but leaves streaks on page and is quite low on toner. Replacing the photoconductor and toner is just about expensive enough to justify consideration of buying a new printer altogether instead.
So anyway, I might be in the marker for a new printer, which reminded me of one of the best pieces of tech journalism of this decade . I also noticed it has been followed by sequels for subsequent years. Also a rare example of LLM use I can approve of, even if having to fight fire with fire (or search engines with slop) is a bit saddening.
A little offtopic (or I guess it's almost ontopic for NotAwfulTech), but I found myself considering a color printer and seems that LED printers are the new hotness for that. Since the top results when searching "led vs laser color printer" are mind-numbing slop, I thought I'd ask if anyone here has experience with LED printers. Any typical pitfalls to watch out for? Is Brother still the least worst brand for them?
* For the curious, the printer requires a plugin called HPLIP. My distro has an automated installer for it in its repositories, but the installer's Python code is not compatible with newest Python versions. Thankfully the fix only involves changing a
locale.formattolocale.format_stringin one file and ignoring some warnings about invalid escape sequences. The URL for automatically dowloading the plugin from HP website is also empty, so I had to manually download the.runfile from hplip's sourceforge repository. The filename was also slightly different from what the installer was expecting and the cryptographic signature file was also mandatory, though when the installer tried and failed to download the corresponding key from a keyserver, it let me ignore the signature altogether. I can see how proprietary printer drivers made rms what he is, minus the pro child molestation stuff.Just thinking about how LLMs could never create anything close to Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (specifically Dreams but, uh, you can go your own way, ig)