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.)
From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:
We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we’re forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs… and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
- They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
- They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
- They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they’re trying to sell you.
- They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
- They contradict themselves, pretending they aren’t.
- They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don’t take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
- They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
- They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
- They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
- They’re very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 I don’t believe LLMs will replace programmers. When I code, I dive into it, and I fall into this beautiful world of abstract ideas that I can turn into something cool. LLMs can’t do that. They lack imagination and passion. Thats part of why lisp is turning into my favorite language. LLMs can’t do lisp very well because everyone has a unique system image with macros they’ve written. Lisp let’s you make DSLs Soo easily as though everyone has their own dialect.
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don’t work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone’s done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on “correcting” my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
On the (slim) upside, it’s an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it’s more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I’ve had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium… sometimes it’s still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
I just encountered a thing like this. A subject where no matter what you asked about it this one site was in the top 5 with just incomprehensible posts. Like every sentence on its own made sense, but there was nothing more than that. It read like constant promotional ‘before the actual meat of the article’ stuff but forever. Was really weird.
dhh having a normal one
Look, Google’s trillion-dollar business depends on a thriving web that can be searched by Google.com
Someone should probably tell them.
On my first two reads, I thought that it was heavy-handed satire with mediocre word choice. But no, I suppose that he’s being sincere, in which case I’m glad to notify DHH that Apple products are optional and that a technologist can go their entire lives without purchasing a single Apple product.
Google’s incredible work to further the web isn’t an act of charity, it’s of economic self-interest, and that’s why it works.
Same dumb motherfucker who has been pinching pennies due to poor architecture. Does he think public clouds are acts of charity? Or, going the other direction, this is the same entitled prick who has been naysaying universal basic income because he thinks work gives us purpose like a fucking Calvinist. Does he think UBI is an act of charity? No, DHH, you myopic chud, public clouds and UBI are both concepts borne of economic self-interest.
First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn’t some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they’re supposed to do: rewarding the best.
Lots of credit given to 👼🎺 Free Market Capitalism 👼🎺, zero credit given to open web standards, open source contributions, or the fact that the codebase has a lineage going back to 1997 KDE code.
I think you were trying to reply to this comment
Indeed.
I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.
“markets should reward the best” is quite something
If markets really rewarded the best, they would have rewarded Opera way more. (By which I mean the original Opera, up to version 12, and not the terrible chromium-based thing that has its name slapped on it today. Do not use that one, it’s bad.)
Much more important for Chrome’s success than “being the best” (when has that ever been important in the tech industry?), was Google’s massive marketing campaign. Heck, back when Chrome was new, they even had large billboard ads for it around here, i.e. physical billboards in the real world. And “here” is a medium-sized city in Europe, not Silicon Valley or anything… I never saw any other web browser being advertised on freaking billboards.
Found on the sneer club legacy version -
ChatGPT 4o will straight up tell you you’re God.
Also I find this quote interesting (emphasis mine:
He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.” “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.
I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesn’t have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.
Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests – Ars Technica
Stumbled across a piece from history YTer The Pharaoh Nerd publicly ripping into AI slop, specifically focusing on AI-generated pseudohistory found on YouTube Shorts.
The insistence on blipping out anything even vaguely sexual (like the word orgasm) to appease the kami of the algorithm is really off putting after a while.
I thought he might be doing a bit but it doesn’t feel like it. Also he speaks like old comic word balloons where they would randomly bold every third noun to show intensity.
Less a standard piece and more “Ed Zitron goes completely fucking apeshit for 26 minutes” this time around
Said revenue estimates, as of 2026, include billions of dollars of “new products” that include “free user monetization.”
If you are wondering what that means, I have no idea. The Information does not explain.
Probably something to do with their recent ramblings about getting an openai social network off the ground.
throwback uni game!
From: The Sentry Team <noreply@sentry.io> Subject: Update to Sentry’s List of Subprocessors ... - Google LLC (Google Cloud Services) and OpenAI, L.L.C. are now reflected as subprocessors for all Sentry products, instead of select features only; and - Anthropic, PBC is now added as a subprocessor.sigh
they do still have user-specified controls (and appear to respect them), but… sigh
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285
edit flagged and dead
This feels like a lot of straw man arguments?
No it doesn’t?
Did anyone ever claim these things?
Yes?
Are these problems to implementing SMR? I don’t think so.
OK, but aside from lower efficiency, higher price per watt, and not solving any of the problems they’re supposed to solve, are there any problems with SMR? I don’t think so.
Still sad the SMRs will not work out but good you posted it here. Lol at the HN guy going ‘these are strawmen’, buddy you build websites perhaps the guy in the field (with a physics phd) knows a little bit more.
the shunning is working guys
“The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post”- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn’t get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also ‘Blutarsky’ and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
he’s a centrist econ blogger who’s been getting into light race science
I’m a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I’m also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I’m a moderate.
And he is brave enough to say that:
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There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
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Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
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Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.
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yeah I tried looking up his writings on the subject but substack was down. Counted that as a win and stopped looking.
“Kicked out of a … group chat” is a peculiar definition of “offline consequences”.
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
after I’ve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have “chat to a buddy” as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the “buddy” is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions “MemBot - powered by AI” at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that’s a dead link
I’ve logged a support ticket.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Can’t avoid slop reading translated books, can’t learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It’s the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: that’s a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using what’s called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customer’s TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customer’s TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasn’t even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no one’s surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators they’d had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
it’s just so fucking frustrating
I’ve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. It’s not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.
In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.
AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA
In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.
Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don’t want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
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Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.
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The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
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Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
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Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.
And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the “no longer interested in Season 2” pile, but for different reasons.
The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”
So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.
I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I’m sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can’t see how it’s going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.
That and also: training and running a model still takes a ton of energy! LLMs will never be ethical.
looking into this, but as far as i can tell the AI here is entirely fake
need more to declare it such
Thanks for looking into it. The idea of an ethical data set large enough to train an LLM is suspicious.
current thesis is A Guy Instead in the Philippines, dressing up wireframes
Now I want an anti-AI song parody called “A Guy Instead” to the tune of the Beatle’s “I’ll Cry Instead”
ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever
i don’t expect literally this but there’s some potential hidden sleaziness inside
