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  • Even 4chan can trade/coordinate/and have functional outcomes, sure often for evil.

    To give a rather notorious example, there's the He Will Not Divide Us flag in 2017, which the 'channers tracked down after only 38 hours, despite Shia LeBouf's attempts to keep the location hidden.

    The death penalty of not just you but your whole family if you copy that floppy.

    The future media conglomerates want. (okay maybe not the "death penalty" part - dead people don't make money)

  • In other news, I've stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:

    Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there's people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video's whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there's suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.

    Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.

  • Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:

    Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.

  • It feels like the rise of LLMs has set back cybersecurity by a good decade or so, and by my guess it probably has.

    Agents are throwing away decades of hard-learned lessons in input sanitization (providing cybercriminals a Greatest Hits compilation of vulnerabilities), "vibe coding" is introducing vulnerabilities aplenty to codebases and hiding them under mountains of technical debt/unmaintainable code, LLM usage is damaging coding ability in coders both junior and senior, the entire tech field is haemorrhaging talent from burnout and layoffs, and that's just the things that are immediately coming to mind.

    As I see it, cybersec may find itself practically back to square one once the dust settles.

  • On the one hand, I can see your point - such advertisements could provide the hucksters some positive spin to assist their bubble with.

    On the other hand, Silicon Valley's still got the heavy stench of Eau de Asshole off the AI bubble, with some Eau de Fash off of the Trump administration. If a new tech can be used for evil shit, the public's gonna (rightfully) assume it will be used for evil shit - and I doubt the hucksters can convince the public to think otherwise.

    (also ew, mobile Wikipedia)

  • A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:

    On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,

  • MoreWrite @awful.systems

    QaD's: The Next Tech Bubble

  • Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

    By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.

    Quantum doesn't really have that - the only Big Claim™ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that's near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.

  • On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.

    If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

  • Plus, there's the hefty amount of AI slop that's been shat onto the Internet over the years, plus active attempts to sabotage LLM datasets through tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade.

    So, if and when model collapse fully sets in, its gonna hit all of them at once. Given that freshly trained LLMs are gonna be effectively stillborn, if ChatGPT et al. collapse, it'll likely kill LLMs as a tech for at least the next ten years.

  • I imagine it'll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public's ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.

    Plus, he'll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 24th August 2025

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    A Mini-Essay on Tech's Future Prospects

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    Sarah Lyons on AI doom crankery

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Some Quick-and-Dirty Thoughts on Technological Determinism

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    AI disagreements - Brian Merchant on our very good friends

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th August 2025

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Some Off-The-Cuff Predictions about the Next AI Winter

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th July 2025

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    Godot Showcase - Dogwalk

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    A Mini-Essay on Newgrounds' Resistance to AI Slop

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 13th July 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Rolling the ladder up behind us - Xe Iaso on the LLM bubble

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025

    MoreWrite @awful.systems

    Some More Quick-and-Dirty Thoughts on AI's Future

    NotAwfulTech @awful.systems

    We started porting LEGO Island to... everything?

    SneerClub @awful.systems

    The Psychology Behind Tech Billionaires

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 22nd June 2025

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th June 2025