Want to wade into the sandy 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 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.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    17·
    14 days ago

    From the r/SunoAI subreddit: “Sick of having to come up with prompts”.

    Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?

    (Via Dan of the Year.)

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    10 days ago

    Noted on Bluesky:

    Tomorrow Grimes will DJ a livestream of immortality influencer Bryan Johnson tripping on shrooms to determine its effect on longevity. Mr. Beast and the CEO of Salesforce will be there too.

    Now, folks out there are calling this a Biblically accurate blunt rotation, but to be fair, it’s missing Aella.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      10 days ago

      I was tempted to gawk but then I realised… the guy’s just going to see some shapes in the light and it’s going to be boring as shit

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        10 days ago

        (not in any way meaning to stan the weirdo) at that dosage it might be more than that, but also it’s ??? to me to consider taking that much while also being exposed to a bunch of people like that around me

        and that it’s even the dosage it is feels like it tells you a hell of a lot about the extent of his baseline intake too

        these creeps are doing a better job at antidrug messaging than any propaganda I ever saw

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          10 days ago

          I dont know much about dosage numbers etc, care to mention a bit more how much is normal and how much he is off the baseline?

          (I just recall some old friends who once tried shrooms and didnt seem to notice much so they went to a disco and for one of them it hit at the middle of the dancefloor so he stood there like a statue (the guy was also tall and a metalhead, so quite a sight). And before it became illegal (some tourist got himself killed by using shrooms and drinking and they blamed the shrooms) to give others spores or something I managed to get some from someone as a promo/anarchist thing. Never did anything with them).

          (Fine if you dont want to, or if talking about it exposes you/others to risk etc, dont. Just curious).

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            10 days ago

            I dont know much about dosage numbers etc, care to mention a bit more how much is normal and how much he is off the baseline?

            “normal” is a bit of a fucked term when dealing with this stuff, in part because we really don’t have good human-wide data (hi can you see what ghoulfuck is playing off of?). why don’t we have that? oh y’know that entire little multidecade war on drugs things perpetetrated by the selfsame government that is…[…breathe]

            that said, psychonautwiki is a more informative starting point than I could concisely be. that also said, part of the fucky bit is that you get different strains of shrooms, with different effective concentrations of psychoactive compounds (eg psilocybin cubensis vs psilocybin cyanescens)

            beyond that, I don’t really think that awful is a place for psychedelic discussion (and I wouldn’t try to make it one). there are often conversations to be had, but here ain’t the where

            • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
              5·
              10 days ago

              Thanks! And of course there is a wiki for it.

              E: unrelated to the talks about shrooms. Didn’t Grimes talk to Aella about how they felt cheated by people around them who were a lot more evil than they pretended to be, wonder why this doesn’t seem to have caused a change of heart/scenery.

              • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
                2·
                9 days ago

                re your edit: it hasn’t changed because those words are just a front, a way to try save face as they get caught out with their bullshit. both of them have a choice, and have had a choice this whole time. they keep choosing to be where they are, what they say

          • macroplastic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            4·
            10 days ago

            That’s about twice a ‘normal dose’ and in the realm of what Terrence McKenna would call a ‘heroic dose’.

            Mushrooms vary a lot in real potency but at that level of dosage ego death is almost guaranteed, and it’s likely that the user will spend at least 30 minutes to an hour unable to articulate language.

            • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
              7·
              10 days ago

              it’s likely that the user will spend at least 30 minutes to an hour unable to articulate language.

              This presumes Johnson was able to articulate language in the first place, which given that his brain has melted at an incredible pace since 2020 may be a bit of a stretch.

                • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
                  6·
                  10 days ago

                  This doubly disappoints me because in a professional capacity I strive for being incredibly intentional and accurate while recreationally I aspire to shitposting, and “more accurate than most” satisfies neither. I really need to get my blood boy to write better material.

            • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              10 days ago

              I love the phrase ego death because everyone I’ve heard describe the experience sounds like the most egotistical mf in the universe with how impressed they are by their own self-enlightenment.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      9 days ago

      Btw, im a bit afraid to ask, as I should actually have googled this first (but I’m also becoming weary of google, tried to find some code related things yday and it was giving me wild results, it used to be better at that), but is there a sort of guide on blacksky, like what does joining one of those sites imply (I think I should join the ‘blacksky for non-poc’ variant, at least I got that was a thing) but how well does it interact with the main bsky, how easy is it to switch, consequences for interactions/follows/followers, etc etc. Anybody have a guide on that? In an attempt to migrate away more from bsky which is making a few questionable moderation decisions. (I also know that due to how the whole system is setup, migrating doesn’t actually get you away from those decisions, so I’m also asking out of curiosity, so take that into account regarding how much effort to put into my question, also means ignoring/not reacting is fine. Just shooting a shot, and trying to be clear about intentions, and my feelings re reactions).

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    12 days ago

    link

    article link

    transcript

    Graham Linehan is a normal and well man.

    A few hours later, he sends me an example of how he’s been using AI. It’s a “hidden role deduction” game he’s working on. At the top is the prompt he put into ChatGPT: “You are five blind lesbian adventurers out for a good night out. Slaying dragons and whatnot. But one of your number is a hulking great troll pretending to be a woman. Find the troll lesbian and then devise an amusing punishment without giving him an erection.

    • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      12 days ago

      oh no

      He followed his friends Andrew Doyle and Martin Gourlay, formerly of GB News, over here. They were hired by US comic actor Rob Schneider’s production company and put in a word for Linehan. He moved in March and works for Schneider too. Having co-created Father Ted in the 1990s and created The IT Crowd in the 00s, Linehan is co-creating a sitcom called Tenure – “Our academics are like Father Ted academics: they’re very old and musty” – with Doyle, Gourlay and British comedian Jonathan Kogan. They’ve written eight episodes.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      10 days ago

      Yeah thats a kink. There prob are a bunch of sex workers he could hire who could help him with that.

      E: forgot to mention, a sex worker even confirmed this is a kink.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        10 days ago

        I don’t think sex workers should be tasked with society offloading glinner

        glinner should fucking suck less

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          Certainly. Some might want to take his service however, not going to speak for them. But doubt he would be a good client, nor that he would pass the vibe check for any who didn’t already knew who he was. So not sure if he is even able (also doubt he is mentally able as he sees women too much as objects to he saved/protected vs actual people).

          But yes sorry if that came off as offloading societies problems on sex workers.

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    15 days ago

    Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an “AI overview” on the top of the page…

    In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

    Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

    All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

    […]

    For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

    This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    16 days ago

    Semi-relevant, Matthew Garrett has won a court case against the kooks running Techrights:

    https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115581959497817474

    About the only positive thing you can say about Schestowitz (and probably his wife) is that they are rabidly anti-AI, but that is only because they are also rabidly against anyone who does not subscribe to their personal purity-test vision of Free Software (basically it’s them, RMS, and maybe his parrot).

    I have an unhealthy interest in them, because during the Andrew Lee putsch they were basically on his side, until he fucked even them, and I kinda drifted into their IRC server to see what was up. It was my unwelcome introduction to the toxic underbelly of FLOSS, with rampant RMS-worship, misogyny, racism and incipient techno-fascism. I ducked out quite quickly.

    Tellingly, Techrights is all in on the Gemini protocol.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      13 days ago

      people out there signing off shit like that with their online presence that wouldn’t be waterboarded out of anyone 15 years ago

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      15 days ago

      JFC, man. Fuck this snivelling weasel. I read the whole thing. How dare he even suggest he has a fleck of humility in his being. He goes in saying he submitted his changes as an RFC instead of a pull request, but goes balls deep on trying to defend his work as worthy of submitting. Utter bullshit.

      Some quotes:

      My explicit statement of having “no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base” was not seen as a gesture of honest humility,

      “I have no intent on understanding this codebase that I’m 100% sure I’ve created a good change for, be grateful, peasants.”

      also, him, explicitly not a developer, spake thusly:

      This sentiment exposes the raw nerve of the open-source world: developer burnout.

      vibe codes once I am become jeff, coder at google

      Finally, this massive turd:

      The Mesa project’s updated contributor guidelines, which now demand that any submitter of AI-assisted code must understand it as if they wrote it themselves, has been lauded by some as a pragmatic solution. I contend it is a policy of convenience, a blunt instrument designed not to solve a complex problem, but to legislate it out of existence. It is a fortress wall built to protect the status quo, and while it may offer the illusion of security, it does so at the cost of innovation and by silencing a new and potentially valuable class of contributors. The discussion should not end here, with a policy that prioritizes procedural purity over measurable progress. The true challenge has been misdiagnosed; the pathology is not the “user with an AI,” but a rigid, legacy process that lacks the antibodies to handle a new form of discovery.

      Honestly this guy should just start his own fucking codebase where him and his promptfondling circlejerk buddies can vibecode bricks together.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        15 days ago

        Yeah I was reminded of this guy by some posts on bsky, and mentioned there I didn’t want to link to him directly because I don’t think that kind of stuff is nice and just leads to harassment, but reading those two new blog posts really made me doubt that for a moment. (Of course only posting it here is a good alternative, looking back at the old posts I had also forgotten that he just was a weird conservative).

        I also found the part where he said ‘I even labeled it as an experiment’ quite annoying, that he doesn’t realize that this doesn’t matter at all. The developers still need to evaluate it like any normal post, and he didn’t even ask them permission to do the experiment.

        • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
          7·
          15 days ago

          “I even labeled it as an experiment. A social experiment, some might say. I’m saying it was just a prank, bro. But really you’re the bad person because you were mean to me.” This is DARVO, right?

          You’re right that sharing this stuff leads to harassment, at least a lot of the time. I have no interest in personally engaging with this fuck.

          • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
            8·
            15 days ago

            I’m esp weary of sharing stuff like this on a place like bsky, esp when I was just replying to others being a bit annoyed at people doing LLM based PRs. Hope people here have better self control at not actually going after people.

            • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
              8·
              15 days ago

              One would hope! Don’t piss in the popcorn, as they say. Also, don’t do any stupid shit that might cause more work for our glorious admins, i.e. leave a trail of breadcrumbs back to awful.systems.

    • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      15 days ago

      the obnoxious self-aggrandizement is dripping all over the text, not the least of which when he conceptualizes himself as a part of a “new and potentially valuable class of contributors”, as if the addition of a slop-generator can transform the layperson into someone capable of contributing to a complex software project. but that’s old news. here’s what’s getting me now:

      For a project like Mesa, which uses the permissive MIT license, accidentally incorporating a snippet of code that carries the “viral” obligations of the GPL could potentially trigger a legal catastrophe. Faith Ekstrand drove this point home with a chillingly practical example: “If we piss off Nvidia and they sue us, the project is over. It doesn’t matter whether or not we can theoretically win.”

      this is a legal issue – this should be Seyfarth’s home turf! obviously he can’t code and has a sneering contempt for anyone who learns to do so, but in this micro-instance, giving an informed legal opinion on how this issue could be handled would actually be in the Mesa project’s best interests! let’s see how he

      However this is a hypothetical scenario and there are several ways to mitigate such legal risks. Most projects already shift the legal burden to the contributor. The project still has to reject any code that openly violates the licensing terms, but if such violations are not obvious, there is little legal risk to the project itself.

      “it wouldn’t happen, and even if it did, you could just try to sacrifice your individual developers to NVIDIA one at a time and hope that makes them go away.” great cool thank you. this is the best you’ve got with your legal background. fantastic. what an utter tool

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        14 days ago

        And all of this over a local 1% speed increase. Which he imagines just works just as well for everyone else. (I noted the Rationalism style, calculate this minor increase over all potential (imagined) users to make it into a big thing bit as well).

        And his source for the increase? He played two games. (One of which was cyberpunk, which iirc can be weird re gpu optimizations, so it isn’t even a reliable indication).

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        11 days ago

        Dont start hoaxes

        As a confession, I did that once, made up a fictional thing. The page lived for quite a long time. Untill somebody outside of my circle saw the orphaned page and promptly (and rightfully) deleted it. Was 20 years ago or so however.

        It was so orphaned it didnt even get indexed by search engines.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      12 days ago

      Lmao imagine reading a Stephenson book and being peeved that it ends

      (His sex scenes are far far far worse than his endings, those are a mercy)

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        12 days ago

        oh yeah the relationship between the fusion-device wielding 30-something Aluetian freedom fighter and the 16 year old skateboard courier in Snow Crash is… of its time

        • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          11 days ago

          Yup that’s one of them. The cryptonomicon protagonist no-nut-Novembering all the way to the ww2 treasure is another special fave

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          6·
          11 days ago

          We were reading through various classics for bookclub and we noticed how many books had a ~14 year old girl has romantic/sexual relationship/gets abused by 30+ year old man. Snow Crash was one of those. I know popular thinking on this has changed a lot the past 20+ years but still always a shock, esp when you realize how much you didnt notice it.

          Also a reason why the first evil dead aged very badly. Dont show that to people without warning them unless you want them to leaf.

    • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      12 days ago

      Best part is the footnote:

      About 20 years ago, some spammers came up with a bright idea for circumventing spam filters: they took a bootleg copy of my book Cryptonomicon and chopped it up into paragraph-length fragments, then randomly appended one such fragment to the end of each spam email they sent out. As you can imagine, this was surreal and disorienting for me when pitches for herbal Viagra and the like started landing in my Inbox with chunks of my own literary output stuck onto the ends. Come to think of it, most of those fragments actually did stop in mid-sentence, so I guess if today’s LLMs trained on old email archives it would explain why they “think” I write that way.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        12 days ago

        Someone in the comments found the github (??) where they made the site or something, and it def was generated initially, but it used heavy nerd speak so it was translated.

        “Warning: his endings are notoriously abrupt, like a segfault in the middle of your favorite function.”

    • aspragg@ohai.social
      42·
      12 days ago

      @gerikson @BlueMonday1984

      Hypothesis 3: As some people seem to insist, “literally” has recently morphed into a contronym, and now it figuratively also means “figuratively”.

      …sorry, I meant it literally also means “figuratively”.

      …no, wait, that’s just the same thing. 🙄 It *actually* also means “figuratively”.

      (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        15·
        12 days ago

        What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now?

        “Literally, not figuratively”, said in a Sterling Archer voice.

        The use of literally in a fashion that is hyperbolic or metaphoric is not new—evidence of this use dates back to 1769. Its inclusion in a dictionary isn’t new either; the entry for literally in our 1909 unabridged dictionary states that the word is “often used hyperbolically; as, he literally flew.”

        — Merriam-Webster

      • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        11 days ago

        It seems really common for words for factuality to become intensifiers. I just used the word “really” as an intensifier, thought it really means things occurring in reality. “Very” had the same thing happen to it, as it originally meant “truthfully” (as in “verify” or “verity”). If I say something is “truly massive”, am I likely specifying the massiveness is not imaginary in some sense, or am I trying to convey massiveness beyond the lower bounds of “massive”? Is a “proper banger” of a tune distinct from an improper banger or is it just a highly bangerful banger?

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        11 days ago

        (Really? People couldn’t find a better new word to provide emphasis than “literally”? What word do they want to unambiguously represent that concept now? Do they care? Ugh…)

        Bit late to tilt at this windmill tbh. Prescriptivist pedantry is prohibited past puberty. This was decreed by Maximilian D. English (the D stands for dictionary) in 1727. I don’t make the rules (MDE does)

      • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        11 days ago

        tom sawyer literally rolling in wealth

        but he never helps huck finn out financially?

        pretty shit story, mark

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    10 days ago

    And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.

    Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.

    it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with

    It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined

    Oof.

    https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

    • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 days ago

      That’s pretty long and you should definitely repost it in the next sack. I lightly skimmed it and will read it in full later.

      RE, the LLM of it all: Wonder how many times this has already happened:

      “AI, please invent a new project management ideology for me, improving on agile and waterfall!”

      “Certainly. Here’s AgileFall, a linear combination of the two. What the fuck were you expecting here?”

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    14 days ago

    Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

    As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

    She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

    Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

    The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

    Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

    Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn’t the first time that we’ve tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn’t likely to walk away.

    • bitofhope@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      14 days ago

      She wants to be a martyr so bad, doesn’t she? She desperately needs to be punished for the sake of her beliefs (and the things she did made others do). All for the great cause of… uh… y’know, the important thing she’s being silenced for. Things like that.