Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)

  • scruiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    7·
    15 hours ago

    A lesswronger asks are we rationalfic protagonists the baddies? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=uDuzmfMEvEqpyApLh

    tldr; rationalfic has a very common trend of the protagonist gaining and using overwhelming power to radically reform the world. This is almost (with a few notable exceptions) portrayed as clearly unambiguously good thing.

    My take: Don’t get me wrong, the Wizarding World (for example), as canonically portrayed needs some very strong reforms if not an entire revolution. But rationalfic almost never portrays the slow hard work of building support networks and alliances and developing a materialist theoretical understanding of how to reform society, as opposed to a lone (or small friend group) rationalist hero finding some overwhelming magical or technological advantage they can use to single-handedly take control and use their rationalist intellect to unilaterally fix everything. Part of it is the normal disconnect of fiction to the real world were it is more narrative satisfying (and easier to write) to have a central protagonist the solves the major problems or is at least directly involved with them, and rationalfic involves that protagonist gaining even more agency than they canonically do. The problem is that rationalist take this attitude back into real life, and so end up idolizing mythologized techbro billionaires or venture capitalist or the myth of the lone genius scientist/inventor.

    Also, quality sneer in the replies, “rational” teletubbies: https://tomasbjartur.bearblog.dev/rational-teletubbies/

    • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      8 hours ago

      They also don’t want to believe in chaos theory. This post tries to explain it to them, but check out Gwern in the comments being skewered by a book written by Freeman Dyson around the time he was born. They want the future to be perfectly predictable (even though Yud says that 1 and 0 are not probabilities) and they don’t like game theory, repeated games, or non-zero-sum games, because those reward people from building trust then violating it.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      11 hours ago

      Part of what makes the RatFic version of this so weird imo is that despite being ostensibly rooted in relatively low-hanging fruit (e.g. what if we industrialized this pre modern setting, what if we rationally looked at the rules of this magic system, etc.) nobody other than the protagonist has ever thought about these things and even once the protagonist starts demonstrating some real world-conquering results (benevolently, of course) nobody ever really seems to want to copy their successes. Part of what made the actual industrial revolution unfold the way it did was because of the ensuing arms race of it. In addition to causing the lines on various economist’s charts to go nearly vertical this also basically culminated in the first world war, which seems like the kind of event that they should be aware of. But of course in RatFic it seems like anyone who can’t be talked around to joining up with our protagonist is too weak or woke or stupid to actually pose a threat to the Glorious March of Rational Progress.

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      18 hours ago

      “I did the AI that people largely hate, but the next guy, HE’S the real AI CEO. Just remember him, not me, the guy who did the stuff.”

  • EponymousBosh@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    3 days ago

    A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend’s (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al’s time.

    So I guess that’s the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        2 days ago

        Hey, it’s not just that, that’s unfair to the chatbots. They’re also used out of contempt for one’s employees

        • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          Ah, of course! I come from a corp culture where co-workers were also called customers (“users” actually but you know)

            • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              14 hours ago

              On one hand, no, it’s an inevitable consequence of a company becoming so large that it needs a department to manage its internal infrastructure. When I worked at Google, my customers were Googlers; that is, the services I owned were only queried by fellow employees. On the other hand, books like The Circle are popular precisely because they capture the quasi-cult vibe of working at places like Google.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:

    “The AI Grad Student”: A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.

    Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: “It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.”

    But he ends the essay with “Now I’m doing 100% of my research with LLMs”.

    Am I losing my mind?

    Hang around for the “trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube” guy in the comments.

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.

      … instead we get to live in eddington.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        I’ve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, there’s actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc

        kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          As a counterpoint, there’s a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.

          COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It’s hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.

          • TrashGoblin@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            18 hours ago

            Over here, measles hits mostly kids, but if anything, the new measles epidemic seems to have made antivaxxers double down.

            • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
              2·
              10 hours ago

              Yeah it’s tragic, but I think it can be “explained” in that incorrect idea that measles isn’t that bad, really, and it was “natural” to get it. I don’t know the exact lethality differences between the diseases in question - just that for an otherwise healthy 20 year old university student, being forced to stay at home because of a disease mostly killing octogenarians is easier to protest against than something that’s killing you and your fellow ravers.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            2 days ago

            People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            2 days ago

            oh sure, I didn’t mean to imply that good isn’t happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      They are now also dropping their porn chatbots. (Remember though, they were late with that, from what I heard the market on that was already filled).

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          10 hours ago

          Not sure, from what I heard lot of porn people use other models anyway. Not exactly sure which models (I heard there are also places where there are jailbroken models, but im not going to look for that for obvious reasons), but from what I heard a while back grok/gemini/deepseek were popular. Low N on that however. Grok seems to be esp popular for revenge porn sort of shit however.

          For example see the usage stats here for roleplay using janitor.ai (most roleplay is not erotic however (the site has no ‘erotic content’ tracking), but still, openAI’s models are not in the top 20). This is however free vs priced models etc (and deepseek is a lot cheaper, which is important for roleplay esp if you want a history, as that context needs to be added every time (the powercost of all this must be insane)).

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      3 days ago

      Really hope this is going to be the wave breaking, as it is getting so stupid. (Some dutch library had all its new books be ai slop (some even quite racist it seems), and this isnt a single incident).

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      You know, when I think about securely holding onto things and protecting them without damaging or dropping them, I think of a fucking OPEN CLAW said nobody ever.

    • fiat_lux@lemmy.world
      9·
      3 days ago

      The Tumblr thread about covers it, but I had a quick look through the code and this caught my attention in the get2fa.ts file. It’s used in Authorisation headers for https://api.resend.com/emails requests. I’ve never used an aws secretsmanager but I’m pretty sure this is a no.

      const RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN = 'arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-2:<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>:secret:RESEND_API_KEY-<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>';

      const result = execSync( 'aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id "${RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN}" --region us-east-2 --profile <REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING> --query SecretString --output text', { encoding: 'utf-8' } ).trim();

    • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      Oh jolly can’t wait for this to go viral enough that my boss schedules time to ask me about it.

      The tumblr thread is a must read if you’ve ever been near HIPAA regulated infrastructure.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    19·
    4 days ago

    I saw this headline:

    Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof

    And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:

    Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago

    he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.

    fireproof steel I-beams

    a dedicated fire department

    Journalists know that they don’t have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it’s my own fault for clicking on it.

  • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    fresh hellish nonsense brought to you by ai-gen podcasts enabled by techbros interpretation of consent and privacy:

    https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/

    WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.

    “WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      3 days ago

      Is it going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package? Probably going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package. You know, for AI.