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.)
Minor bit of personal news: Newgrounds got hit with a wave of AI slop games recently.
I caught onto it back on Wednesday, but didn’t get official confirmation until yesterday, when another user investigated the games and discovered the exact slop-generator used to shit them out - VIDEOGAME.ai.
and next this one that’ll be making waves too
Ed Zitron summarizes his premium post in the better offline subreddit: Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI?
Summary of the summary: they fully expected OpenAI would’ve gone bust by now and MS would be looting the corpse for all it’s worth.
I also feel like while it’s absolutely true that the whole “we’ll make AGI and get a ton of money” narrative was always bullshit (whether or not anyone relevant believed it) it is also another kind of evil. Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves. Like, if they did believe their own hype and weren’t grifting their hearts out then they’re a whole different class of monster. From an ethical perspective, the grift narrative lets everyone involved be better people.
This Thiel interview clip is amazing
Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he’s spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a “machine god” & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.
on the topic of bunk wiki articles, what is this lmao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_of_astronomical_suffering
I’m in therapy and much better than I used to, but from my past before that, I am unfortunately quite experienced over many years in having existential worries and anxieties about extremely unlikely things.
And then I see this…
Cosmic rescue mission […] These missions aim to identify and mitigate suffering among hypothetical extraterrestrial life forms
…and damn, that’s next-level thinking, even for me.
According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios.
Guys I have found a way to phrase my anxiety in a way where every single word is extremely load-bearing
@UltimateNoob @techtakes This is … actually really neat feedstock for us SF authors, amirite?
It’s like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him
New Yorker put out an article on how AI use is homogenizing thought processes and writing ability.
Our friends on the orange site have clambored over each other to all make very similar counteraguments. Kind of proves the article, no?
I love this one:
All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.
Holy shit. Yes, TV has reduced the strength of accents. But “the death”? Tell me again how little you pay attention to the people you inevitably interact with day to day.
I would also like to understand under what definition ChatGPT can be classified as “connection technology”.
ChatGPT connects your brain to a quality '50s-era psychiatrist, who can then lobotomise you non-invasively and turn you into a perfect office worker for our billionaire overlords
Also tell me more about how you don’t have a lower-class or nonwhite-coded accent.
All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.
Listen to a Geordie for five minutes and say that to me with a straight face. I fucking dare you. (Not you, the orange site member)
Was checking out the QOI image format and the politics of the dev and found that he is pretty comfortable around the ladybird people. (sigh) Also the r slur on twitter.
Really amazing that such a simple format achieves PNG sizes and faster encoding speeds. 1-page specification, though it’s more like 2 with a bit bigger text, for bragging rights.
Wait Ladybird is anti-woke? Sigh am I going to have to make my own browser?
(I know I know I’m a lot better about posting about wanting to do cool stuff than actually doing it, hazard of having a full time job)
Yeah I saw that but had completely forgotten about it in the meanwhile because I have the memory of a goldfish.
In the grand scheme of things there are worse controversies, but I would so love an enthusiast browser that is, well, “woke” rather than one having a faint stink of techbro worldview about it.
true that
Dominic Szablewski also founded the German image board pr0gramm where he is known under the name cha0s. It’s similar to 4chan in many ways. That he enjoys the Ladybird crowd isn’t surprising.
Woah i had no idea. Apparently he also made a web crypto miner used in hacked sites.
Another response to Ptacek. “Vibe coding as contempt for materiality” part is particularly good.
give this its own post
Sure, done.
Concurring with everyone else that this is a 10/10 read. This article lays out a very reasonable theory that explains why tech maniacs are the way that they are.
Probably worth a thread in its own right. I find the “contempt” framing to be particularly powerful. Contempt as illustrated herein is the necessary shadow of the relentlessly positivist “you can do/be anything!” cultural messaging that accompanied the rise of the current tech industry. (I’m tempted to use Neil Postman’s term “technopoly,” but I feel the need to reread his book at least once more before appropriating it wholesale into these discussions.) The positivism is the seed that drives people to take an aggressively technical approach to reality, and contempt is one possible response to reality imposing constraints through technical limitations. Not necessarily one that I have ever chosen myself, but I see now that much of what we discuss here comes from people who have.
Overall I think this essay is going to be a bedrock reference for a lot of people going forward.
That is the kind of writing that absolutely anyone can get a thing out of. Will cause me to introspect.
We were joking about this last week if memory serves, but at least one person out there has started a rough aggregator of different sources of pre-AI internet dumps.
It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?
It’s all gotta be in the models by now, but it’s gonna be a cool resource for something, right?
It’ll also be helpful for helping the 'Net recover from the slop-nami once AI finally dies.
Update from Brian Merchant: The first edition of AI Killed My Job has just dropped
✨The Vibe✨ is indeed getting increasingly depressing at work.
It’s also killing my parents’ freelance translation business, there is still money in live interpreting, and prestige stuff or highly technical accuracy very obviously matters stuff, but a lot of stuff is drying up.
Apparently Jan Marsalek worked for the GRU. Trashfuture is going to feast:
AI powered lie detectors spotted in the wild - https://pimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100.png => https://eyecanknow.com/
Brought to you by researchers at the University of Utah. smh.
Dan McQuillian just dropped the text of a seminar he gave: The role of the University is to resist AI
Woke: pile driving AI advocates
Bespoke: pounding prediction market peddlers
Last Week Tonight’s rant of the week is about AI slop. A Youtube video is available here. Their presentation is sufficiently down-to-earth to be sharable with parents and extended family, focusing on fake viral videos spreading via Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest; and dissecting several examples of slop in order to help inoculate the audience.
