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.)
Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.
E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol
Do you mean op as in the guy who posted it or who wrote it? The latter has some really bad arguments imho. Esp for a ‘professional philosopher’.
On the subject of AI art being bad for artists: “Compare banning lightbulbs for putting candle-makers out of work. Then suppose that lightbulbs are in fact perfectly legal, but some luddite ideologues manage to capture certain online spaces and ban anyone from using a backlit screen to view the website”
I did look into this at time of edit: the author of the article linked AND the poster of the link are nestled in rat space. So yes
E: when I wrote this comment, I was only thinking about the statement “OP is an EA/LWer”. to be clear:
author of the article claims that they tried to post one of their articles to r/philosophy, and because the article contained AI generated content, they received a 3 day ban
poster of the article is a separate person
E2: the author of the article is also participating in the reddit thread, FWIW
Ah so both. Yeah the candle maker quote is from the writer of the article.
discussion continued here: ----> https://awful.systems/comment/8326480
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? it’s one thing if it’s gaming-related[1], but when i’m at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say “ask for help in our discord server”, i feel like i’m in a fever dream and i’m going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
i guess. not really, fuck discord. ↩︎
this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset
and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general
Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.
Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.
From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Let’s delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:
- Every goddamn article reads like this now.
- With this bullet point list at some point.
- I am going to tear the eyes off my head
The worst are slop-generated recipes that you only realise are fake halfway through reading when they tell you to add half a cup of table salt to your cake batter
not even a couple of small rocks? smh
ed zitron must feel so vindicated rn https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
I’ve been recommended more Veo 3 fails by The Algorithm. Apparently even some promptfans think it sucks.
You WILL believe what happened when they tried to replicate Google’s demos using the exact same prompts.
Archive.is because substack sucks. Remember Peter Todd, the ghost in the LLMs? New one of them dropped. Elara Voss
I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the site’s maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.
If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability
(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it’s the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)
(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)
Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.
I’m aware of the cloudflare issue, and I don’t use them. So I’m pretty sure it’s not that. (I use firefox but I turn off DNS over HTTPS)
They get mad at any DNS server that strips/doesn’t include EDNS subnet info (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet)
NextDNS was another that would give me endless captchas.
I had no idea, not having that issue myself, anybody else have this problem? Should I use a different archiver?
More publicity for or longtime friends: Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right, apparently the parties DJ was, as is tradition, a weird nerd: https://bsky.app/profile/alt-text.bsky.social/post/3lvxlb4migv2w (I linked to the alt text which was collected from the image, scroll up for the image itself).
JFC this hurt me to read, as a person who enjoys folk songs played on old instruments. They think this is genetic?!
Well, they are the common clay of the new west.
I’m sorry, as in the awful no-effort MIDIs played through a “medieval” soundfont youtube spammed me with? Jesus Christ that’s embarrassing.
I have not tried to find out what kind of music they played, but the fact that the DJ complained about the music is just amazing. She will talk about this event for years.
In more low-key news, the New Yorker’s given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.
Its hardly anything new (the Luddites’ cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper’s decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.
With that out the way, here’s a sidenote:
When history looks back on the Luddites’ cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.
Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.
Sorry to talk about this couple again, but people are discovering the eugenicists are also big time racists
They have a video basically endorsing ex-gay shit because natalism too. Throws around ‘SSA’ and everything.
Make that TWO videos.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I think the real question is - are white men incompatible with democracy.
Because it seems like it at the moment.
Whenever I see this accusation I’m reminded of the opposite accusation:
" Are white western people biologically predisposed to colonising the globe, imposing dictators on non-white people (incl Arabs), and normalising genocide and violence on non-white people … all whilst maintaining a beautiful polite decorum around the superiority of human rights and democracy?"
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1904/
Wait, are those AMERICANS asking:
“Is the Arab brain 🧠 incompatible with democracy?”
The Americans who overthrew an Iranian democracy to install a dictator and are currently overthrowing their own elected government so they can be ruled by dictator? Those Americans?
🤣🙃
Most inhabitants of Iran would dislike being called Arabs… but I guess the lazy racists are just using it as a shorthand for “brown people who are Muslim”
It’s kind of a missed opportunity too, what with how heavily the OG Persians feature in the early chapters of the racist “clash of civilizations” narrative.
@Soyweiser @BlueMonday1984 I was wondering where this was hosted, and it’s just fucking YouTube.
Once again, AUP’s are just brand safety, and brand safety is just whatever make the most money.
Btw, the ‘teen pregnancy’ thing, is prob a bit ahistorical. If we use teen marriages as a standing for teen pregnancies, these were historically very low. (contrary to what people believe about the past, mostly because strategic marriages by rich people/nobles were not, but those people were not normal people) See: https://bsky.app/profile/nogoodwyfe.bsky.social/post/3lv2ehbn7pc2x
But reactionaries gotta go back to some imagined ideal past. No matter what actually learned people say. (and that is also why the far right is anti-intellectual).
Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.
(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)
I assume they don’t know teen pregnancies peaked in the 90s.
This is just haplessly comical. The AI-generated sinister hijab lady, the attempts at algorithm-compliant YouTube face, the fact that they’re doing this instead of raising their kids (which may be beneficial for the kids in the long run…) Who do they imagine they’re convincing?
I’d assume they need X pieces of
flairpropaganda to get their theilbucks.I think they get to cash in their Racism Points for Thielbucks at the end of the month
Removed by mod
Ah, yes, Western Paganism is famed for its uniformity of belief and complete lack of objectionable people saying hateful things. (Pay no attention to the Nazis behind the curtain, they’re not Real Pagans™.)
Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called “GreenDildoCoin” and they’ve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.
Polymarket even had a “prediction” on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn’t be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it
None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women’s sports by the sorts of losers who make “jokes” about no one watching WNBA games.
It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).
OpenAI is food. You can tell because it’s washed, rinsed, and cooked.
Call me AGI because I am stealing this without attribution
this gave me a good chuckle after a few Some Fuckin Days, ty
who’s the bigger fish that’s gonna eat them?
@dgerard@awful.systems probably. you can tell because of the food poisoning. (Hope you’re feeling better!)
ChatGPT-5 is having a day on r/ChatGPT.
Can we call this the peak of the LLM hype cycle now?
Half of these are people using GPT to write a rant about GPT and the other half are saying “skill issue”, it’s an entirely different world.
Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.
Only taste tester I trust dropped his verdict
(Bonus)
