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.)

(OT: 🎶 Do you remember…)

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      4 days ago

      Ow look petrov day. Looks closer its about the acausalrobotgod.

      And really? A Battlestar Galactica reference? (The so say we all stuff).

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          I was skimming it and then scrolled down to check if they went all ‘AI scary’, and then I saw some weird ritual parts in the end where I saw the ‘so say we all’ bits.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      A ritual relying on a terribly eurocentric history of humanity, that quotes Nick Bostrom alongside Galileo and Thomas Edison? Why, LessWrongers, you shouldn’t have…no really, you shouldn’t have.

      Also they do the “that’s a nice quote isn’t it…it’s from Hitler!” bit, which seems like kind of a cheap routine to have in your ritual.

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      This is a literal indoctrination ceremony to soften people up to the idea of progress at all costs.

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      5 days ago

      The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.

      This is frustratingly vapid. It’s really not that complex. The agents have been trained to use hacking tools and then given access to hacking tools. If you train a pigeon that it should tap on a window to get a treat it can guide a missile to a target. There is no nuance or complexity here. The frontier labs are deliberately poking the regulation bear to stifle competition and ensure they get points for good cooperation when bailout time is upon us. It’s no more complicated than that. The media needs to stop breathlessly repeating this shit

      • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        4 days ago

        Also the main problem here is that security has been shit for years because the result of any security incident anywhere by-and-large been a “not my problem” situation for the companies hacked.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        5 days ago

        I actually love the pigeon missile analogy here. Sure, you can wax poetic about how impressive it is to train a pigeon to do much of anything, and you did have to work hard and apply specialized knowledge and whatever to make it happen, but outside of animal training circles the pigeon is the least interesting or dangerous part of the whole contraption.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        4 days ago

        Yeah they are sort of script kiddies without the kids. (Which fits with how Ibheard AI be explained as ‘a very enthousiastic young teen’. Which put me off wanting to do anything with AI even more).

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    6 days ago

    Here’s a LWer being very wrong about how US politics work

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WMBgSseHJpghhma4n/we-need-a-better-theory-of-polarization-because-it-s-failing

    First warning sign: “the US started becoming polarized with the election of Barack Obama”

    “Affordability” won the frame for 2026, and I’m not sure I remember the last time the right talked like they are playing catchup.

    uh, are you in your early 20s??? (who am I kidding of course you are)

    You’d think bayesians of all people would try to avoid extrapolating from the position smack dab in the middle of a current news cycle

    • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
      15·
      6 days ago

      basically because the left has out-ridiculous-ed Trump on culture war issues.

      You can always find a single sentence in a political LW post that shows how much they hate marginalized people.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        5 days ago

        I mean, I guess the consequences and policies associated with culture war shit did abruptly go from ridiculous to real fucking serious what with the camps and the trying to unperson trans people and the overturning Roe v Wade. Maybe that leaves the Dems (who I assume are still being treated as “the left” in this discussion) in a more ridiculous position?

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        5 days ago

        “sure Trump is renaming AI, but I saw a without context post which I didnt understand of a trans person who has 100 followers so the left is worse”

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      6 days ago

      I was going to try and sneer this further but I realized that my own narrative of political polarization almost started with Clinton and I’m in my early 30s, meaning that the problem is obviously whoever the president was when the person making the argument was a child.

    • rhamph@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      5 days ago

      I see they’re still offering free copies “For US Kindle readers, while supplies last.” Perhaps they’re not that popular 🤔 (per this lesswrong, there were 1000 on offer)

      edit: you know… if they were really serious about the doom and gloom, wouldn’t they just offer free ebooks to literally anybody? Would their site not just have a prominent link to a PDF of all the important things we need to know to navigate this tumultuous time? Beyond the core doomer audience, I’m not really sure who the target market is for “The survival of literally everybody is at stake and action is needed now, please give me $20 to learn how”

  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    5 days ago

    from linkedin but in the comments: https://lnkd.in/p/g4VfX3SQ

    chat thread

    Oh I forgot to mention: apparently judges consider AI use in sentencing

    How

    Like if you used AI you get more months

    Huh why

    Because AI can magnify the reach and speed of criminal activity

    Is this like how hitting someone counts more if you used a weapon?

    Yes

  • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    7 days ago

    Ever wondered what kind of workplace environment Elon cultivates? Reading coverage of Tesla’s trial, where complaints were brought by Black folks who felt harassed and discriminated against, gives us an inkling.

    CRD attorney Juan Gamboa asked [Judge] Borkon to bar Tesla’s counsel from contacting anyone on the agency’s witness list. He told the court the CRD had tried to reach at least four other listed witnesses over the past several days without getting a response, and that they’ve fallen “off our radar.” The agency believes Tesla’s lawyers got to them too, either with payments not to testify or by talking them out of it. Gamboa wants to stop Tesla from offering to represent witnesses “through persuasion and payment.”

    You’re going to hear a lot of coverage of this trial, I expect, due to the following antics from Elon’s “hardcore” attorneys. For context, the N-word is an anti-Black slur which is, in the USA, completely unacceptable to use in court or the workplace.

    Tesla’s outside counsel told the judge the N-word is a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. … “This trial is not about the N-word — the N-word is not on trial here,” Jones said.

    Huh, so what’s actually on trial?

    Edwards said a non-Black coworker called him the N-word, cursed at him, and threatened to beat him up. He reported it right away. A month later, he found out his managers had written him up over the incident, and he was later passed over for promotions after applying to more than 100 jobs.

    Oh, that’s pretty awful. That’s depressingly common in blue-collar factory employment, though. I wonder if there’s anything unusual about Tesla’s internal culture when it comes to race relations?

    The CRD’s Brett Watson told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla “the plantation,” with some referring to themselves and Elon Musk as “slave masters,” and graffiti including swastikas, “KKK,” and nooses left on factory walls for days. The second witness, former regional security manager Ozell Murray, testified that his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Tesla’s senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring: “just be sure [the veteran] knows he’ll be called those words.”

    I was at a loss for words for a few minutes after this. Dr. Seuss and Jim Henson together could not create such a caricature of a goose-stepping bigoted incompetent business-muppet as Elon.

    • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      7 days ago

      Hey you know who designs and builds really safe and efficient cars? People who are in a high state of stress and anxiety because they are being slurred at under the implicit threat of a racist attack. /s

    • aninjury2all@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      6 days ago

      Fucking hell, when I was finishing up school I heard classmates joke how Wernher von Boer Musk was a slavedriver based on how much he pushed the engineering teams

      Turns out it’s true in the most literal sense and so much worse than I could have imagined

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        5 days ago

        To be fair, the workplace predates the nazi salute. Does make you wonder how much the thenibb comic applies here, and how much Musk was acting like he was bullied because ‘people cant take a joke’ (before he radicalized into what he is now).

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      7 days ago

      I recall seeing bits of this (their racist treatment of black workers in the factories as well as the culture of keeping it going) kick around on twitter as far back as 2019 (iirc), so now I’m wondering - is it not widely known?

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      8 days ago

      This article deserves dedicated post status. He comes in more gently than I would at the end, but the tl;dr that needs to be hammered into peoples’ heads: Hacker News is not a neutral forum for technical discussion. It is an advertising and propaganda operation administered to shape and condition technical discussions.

        • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
          12·
          7 days ago

          Both HN and shitter are right wing polarisation machines. A guy who was a close friend of mine for years during university went full AI boomer and hangs out on those sites all day and when I recently spoke to him he was describing things as “libtard” and “woke” which 10 years ago would have shocked and appalled him…

    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      18·
      9 days ago

      And not just from AI getting fed into the AI:

      404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.

      “I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    7 days ago

    On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750

    I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        7 days ago

        His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.

          • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            7 days ago

            He was using it as a seed box at one point which for many companies would be an embarrassing indictment of their security postute but luckily, this isn’t exactly meta’s first rodeo when it comes to illegal sharing of IP infringing material.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    8 days ago

    Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.

    After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:

    • Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
    • Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
    • We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
    • It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
    • I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
    • The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.
    • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      8·
      7 days ago

      It honestly bewilders me how badly tech has failed to resist the slop machines.

      Basically everyone else has recognised LLMs for the attack on labour they are and fought back against them, whilst a shocking number of coders and FOSS projects have thrown themselves headfirst into the deskilling machines, all-but forcing the foxes into the henhouse and shouting down anyone who tries to keep them out.

      When this bubble finally blows, we need to work out just how we got to this point, and how to ensure it never happens again.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        5 days ago

        I think the FOSS angle kinda works just off of the inherently unsustainable economics of the space. Relying on unpaid labor makes the worker protection arguments inherently less valuable because it’s not like this was your livelihood to begin with (ostensibly). Keeping up with the next thing is a pretty clear way to keep a mostly-volunteer workforce interested.

      • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
        14·
        7 days ago

        maybe a hot take but there’s no fix for this. The ideology built into the american tech industry makes it permanently susceptible to the Next Big Thing regardless of the second order effects or ideological baggage. Coders have been riding high making extremely inflated salaries for the better part of the last 25 years, and they (mostly) all view themselves as unique brain geniuses that don’t need to work in solidarity with others. Just a collection of monads pursuing their rational self interest via computer touching.

      • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        Reason

        I think Reason Libertarians are like the EAs who are still into bednetting and don’t understand why the founders and most of the funders are focused on longtermism now.

        • fnix@awful.systemsEnglish
          5·
          8 days ago

          I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don’t know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty – oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?