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.
(Taking over for Gerard this time. Special thanks to him for starting this.)
Got a jumpscare watching this.
New elon allegedly spawned 5 months ago via MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
CW: Original source is the new york post, which I thought was an appropriate rag for this kind of news. Feel free to link a non NYP source.
Relevant political cartoon (though I feel gross after looking at it)
E: no prob different person
E2: climbing on my hill See another recent kid from Musk, vs the relative lack of them before ~2018 (my rough estimate when his radicalization by weird twitter people began (I believe he isnt smart enough/has the attention span to be radicalized by moldbug sliding into his dms (also jock vs creep)) began), sure he had an above average amount of kids with his first wife but nothing like the wild secret seeding he does now. I really think he was a late concert to Nazism and not one always (he always was a racist piece of shit). See also how this man who has trouble shutting the fuck up was silent about gomergate1 and approved on hrt for his exdaughter (and due to trans people showing how gender isnt innate, quite performative, and poreus, nazis hate trans people). This is my hill! (Yeah, this doens’t really matter, neo-nazis delenda est no matter when they became one).
Also, was the old messaging exchange that’s been getting some attention sources to “MILO” as in Milo “maybe if I’m hateful enough they’ll ignore that I’m gay” Yanniwhatever?
Yes Nero is that Milo. The reactionary who tried the whole ‘I’m going to troll the liberals by being gay and objectifying black men lol, ow god why are yall trying to eat my face’ guy. Last I heard he is ex gay now. Massive pos, but also turns out that a lot of things he wrote in the before times were actually ghostwritten by others, others who he then didn’t pay (because pos (Sidenote, but it amazes me how many of them simply don’t pay employees/contractors (I assume their dealers do get paid))).
You know, I feel like he’s still breaking down barriers because I’ve never heard of a straight man being that much of a messy bitch.
But internalized homophobia aside the fact that they’re so frequent in failing to pay their hired help really puts the lie to the libertarian side of their ideology. Even if you and I in particular have too much pride and sense to work with them they never seem to have issues finding someone to take the risk, meaning that *someone is getting exploited into make the lifestyles of the rich and famous possible.
MAGA columnist/influencer Ashley St. Clair
ah. earlier someone linked me screenshots of the tweets and I was trying to remember where I knew the name from.
so the nix devenv CLI tool that was gaining popularity around the time I left nix is now doing extremely invasive telemetry and quietly implemented a feature that exfiltrates your entire repo and all related files to their servers to feed into an LLM. if you’d like a reminder of the extreme bad faith the corporate assholes who own nixpkgs operate under, someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKto Nix’s wrapped version of devenv, and the devenv lead maintainer used their elevated privileges on the nixpkgs repo to revert that change instantly without following any existing processes or asking for the community’s consensus.I ranted some time ago about how all these shit commercial tools are just ways to capture and monetize large parts of the nix ecosystem, and the bill has finally come due. lixpkgs can’t happen soon enough (and the nix infra people seem to agree — they’ve been using lix for a while now, cause the regular evaluator is too unstable for large-scale use)
fuck, I saw their “we added a LLM weeee” post, didn’t realize it was this shittily implemented. not too surprised
the rest, ugh. fuck that implementation then
even just using this anywhere with a NDA becomes an instant violation. how little do these fucking dipshits think through their actions…
someone tried to add
DO_NOT_TRACKTangentially related, but I only just now learned about this env var, and the console do not track proposal. While it is a practical solution to the problem of many different env vars… I’m also so annoyed that it’s necessary at all. That it’s required to set some env var to opt-out, instead of being strictly opt-in which such things should always be. Maybe I would like the proposal more if they had called the env var
DONT_BE_SPYWARE.
so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))
it’s some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.
“waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard”
Nothing to see here, just a strong implication that in the minds of these lizards “AI” is a weapon, and the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Because this precise line of thinking has yielded such good results historically.
Also, think of the GDP growth! Imagine the shareholder value we could create boiling an ocean to predict how many letters “r” there are in “strawberry” and failing after billions in VC funding. This should not be regulated, lest progress is halted!
And don’t fret about safety kids, because once we build the genie we get three wishes for sure, and then Sam Altman’s dad will finally look him in the eye and say “I’m proud of you” for the first time, and all will be well in the world.
Idea for another megathread: go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction). Here’s mine:
FWIW I checked a few comment threads and guy is playing this off as lighthearted/a joke, but folks here know better than that.
go to linkedin and post the first thing you see (that provokes a reaction).
Why would you do this to me?
spoiler
Great leadership is born under pressure.
Anyone can perform when things are easy. Real leadership shines in moments of pressure.
Most people react. Great leaders respond.
Here’s how you can too:
❌ “You need to calm down” ↳ Why: Instantly escalates tension ↳ Instead: “I’m noticing we’re both getting tense. Should we take a break?”
❌ “This is a complete disaster” ↳ Why: Spreads panic and paralyzes action ↳ Instead: “What’s the one thing we absolutely must get right?”
❌ “You should have known better” ↳ Why: Creates shame, not learning ↳ Instead: “What can we learn from this for next time?”
❌ “It’s not my fault” ↳ Why: Signals lack of ownership ↳ Instead: “I may have contributed to this. Help me understand where”
❌ “Just figure it out” ↳ Why: Shows poor leadership ↳ Instead: “Can we clarify what success looks like for both of us?”
❌ “Why isn’t this done yet?” ↳ Why: Creates defensiveness ↳ Instead: “What’s the most immediate barrier we need to address?”
❌ “That’s not my problem” ↳ Why: Destroys team cohesion ↳ Instead: “We’re on the same team. Let’s figure this out together”
❌ “I don’t have time for this” ↳ Why: Devalues others’ priorities ↳ Instead: “I want to give this proper attention. Can we schedule 30 minutes?”
❌ “I already told you that” ↳ Why: Makes people shut down ↳ Instead: “Let me explain this another way”
❌ “That’s how we’ve always done it” ↳ Why: Kills innovation ↳ Instead: “What if we tried a different approach?”
The truth: Reputations are fragile. And rebuilding them is expensive.
P.S. Which response do you want to use more often?
—
♻ Repost to help your network communicate better.
➕ Follow me for more like this.
❌ “Why would you do this to me?” ↳ Why: Instantly creates tension. ↳ Instead: “What did I do wrong, and how can I do better next time?”
Just incredible that good leadership equals gaslighting yourself into an abusive relationship
Of all the world wide websites on the web of this wide world LinkedIn might be the one I understand the least, for I dread to even try to understand it.
I assume it’s like an online CV/résumé where you can list your job experience, which seems sensible enough. But it’s also like Facebook for some reason. Well maybe it’s good that someone who needs your skills can also come to you and you need some kind of messaging, call it social network type functionality for that. But also recruiters are spammy pests because obviously they are.
Also apparently some people use it as an actual social media and just post their travel photos or random thoughts there, which is wild to me. It’s like someone writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper to tell them about the pancakes they made in the weekend. How is this your medium of choice for this? And then there are the influencers posting the kind of baffling crap seen in this thread, which are already a mysterious animal by themselves, but how on earth are they doing this on the same website that somewhat normal seeming people just use to host their professional biography?
It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view. Sometimes one of my friends tells me about the funny and cringe cultist orgy they saw at the employment office. “Why were you at the orgy cultist employment office?” I ask them. “I didn’t know you were looking for a job.” And they tell me they weren’t looking for a job, they just go there sometimes. Or maybe HR announces a bowling night or blood drive or whatever and the email includes a link to let everyone (cultists, job seekers and neither of the above) at the cultist employment service office know. So my colleagues do, then they crack a joke about how annoying and weird all the cult stuff in that office is and we all have a chuckle. Just another day of having a white collar job, telling about their day to their mostly non-cultist white collar job having friends at the cult temple that is also an employment agency for cultists and non-cultists alike.
Also it’s hilarious to me that Windows has a built-in global keyboard shortcut for opening LinkedIn in your default web browser and it’s fucking Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Super-L, proving that Windows is the true modern successor of Emacs.
I think, in some sense, it is the purest version of social media. You take anything and everything in your life, commodify and corrupt it into content that serves as some insight into achieving higher business status, garnering reactions, and, in turn, actual higher business status. No other social media is as direct in delivering the desired result.
It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view.
I think this is absolutely true. A more concrete metaphor might be a quidditch/quadball league. There are all kinds of people there for different reasons. Some are there purely for the love of the game, even if they look weird to outsiders. Others are there because they need exercise but have trouble finding joy in playing the sport itself. Some people LARP as the first camp for ulterior motives, like making friends or getting laid. I occasionally walk by the field where they play for the spectacle.
It’s like you founded a combination of an employment office and a cult temple, where the job seekers aren’t expected or required to join the cult, but the rites are still performed in the waiting room in public view.
chef’s kiss
A bit of a superpower, just a bit. A tiny little morsel, a sample of superpower, if you will.
If you gotta qualify it like that…
Credit where credit is due, this is a decent comeback
https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1889063777792069911
Mom says we have Kendrick vs. Drake at home.
I think it’s more like Alien vs Predator.
This came across my desk today. Anything to be skeptical about?
https://www.platformer.news/roost-open-source-trust-safety/?ref=platformer-newsletter
rahaeli on bluesky says this is fine, it’s the same ML that any T&S dept already has to apply to triage the firehose of shit, and doesn’t involve LLMs
merely from seeing the domain and author, probably all of it - casey newton’s got a real bad case of access syndrome, and keeps writing fluff/puff pieces uncritically amplifying tons of bayfucker nonsense
(it’s even beyond the usual levels of what one may refer to as useful idiot)
(I’ll read the rest of it later as my brain boots and the day’s bullshit allows on time)
Ed Zitron behind a tree rubbing his hands together
Well now, this is intriguing. Let me check out their website and see if they have the source code for this open source offering available there. Oh dear, looks like they have forgotten to include a link to the source code (though they did make sure to prominently include the referrer of platformer.news in the URL so that’s good for them). Not to worry, surely they have a GitHub or something. Oh, still nothing. Maybe there’s a link in this Mozilla blog post about it? Still no, but they seem to accidentally imply this is some kind of an AI thing? Is this finally the open source AI we have all been so excitedly waiting for?
To be a little more serious, there’s barely anything here to even be gullible about. Just a Vaporware idol for corpos to have a circlejerk around and congratulate themselves for pretending to do something about the bad vibes. If there’s a real ambition beyond corporate peacockery here, the motivation is merely to take care of the pesky content moderation without having to pay people to do it.
dammit it’s barely days since my open source veneer side comment and then this happens. I’m dubious of even giving a tiny bit of goodwill because with this set of orgs on task and the resources they can muster, surely piddly little things like setting up some infra for publishing and management is in the hours to maybe days spectrum…
casey’s words:
Roblox has already contributed an open-source model for detecting abuse, racism, and sexual content in audio clips
that roblox post that casey links to:
That will likely be open sourced by the end of the first quarter of 2025
I have no mouth and I must scream
Well as they promised Google Maps has finally fallen. It now shows “Gulf of America” and nothing else to US users. I suspect someone outside the US will be shown both the real name and Gulf of America. Denali is still labeled as Denali… for now.
Disorganize the world’s information and make it universally inaccessible and stupid.
Wingnuts genuinely think corporations having a rainbow colored version of their logo on social media in June is proof they’re being controlled by a cabal of woke soy sjw leftists.
Meanwhile corporations the second Donald Trump is in the office again:
Shows up as “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” for me.
Well that’s the stupidest most pathetic way they could have done it, bravo.
Shows up like that in the local (non-US) version here too.
And this would have been such an easy way for Google to show a little bit of (at least symbolic) resistance to everything going on…
Same here. Fucking bootlickers.
same there
Making my service slightly worse once again to own the libs.
In other news, all hell’s broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h
The “AI company” in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.
Thinking I should make this into a full post.
other thread vein: https://awful.systems/comment/6208860
Standard ML or LLM?
To my knowledge, its standard ML. I doubt that’ll help ROOST (the nonprofit in question), considering a lot of the AI stench has rubbed off on ML as well.
We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:
“Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine.”
(It got shorter over time.)
just the sort of ML we already see deployed in social media T&S for triage
Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:
Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their “JeepCares” representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the “X” to dismiss them.
“Listen guys, if you don’t want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also I’m trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way I’m the victim here.”
this is how almost all software works now but because it’s in a sacred place, the car, it is big news
Good point, but for most people it’s really hard to accidentally kill someone if they get distracted on a desktop, laptop, tablet or a phone. Cars are deadly machinery and deliberately distracting the operator of a dangerous machine with your software just to squeeze a little more money from their frustration should be a crime.
Stellantis is circling the drain even more rapidly than Tesla. The 3rd-runner-up car makers of both the USA and Europe bonded together into one great big Megazord of mediocrity. Unsurprising they’d pull something like this.
Ugh. With this, and the recent articles about car makers collecting location data, and the multitude of news about car makers integrating LLMs, it seems that cars are going the same way as TVs, i.e. everything on the market is constantly violating privacy while also throwing ads in your face, and there’s no good models left to buy that don’t do it (to my knowledge). Wondering if there will be any good options left when it’s some day time for a new car…
Re: Smart TVs, what works for me is a Roku TV, skip all of the sign-in shit (don’t even connect it to the internet — update firmware via USB if necessary1). Then, plug in whatever devices and navigate to them. Close enough to a dumb TV for me.
I almost have Android TV figured out: Bought a cheap Onn Android TV box, sideloaded SmartTube in case I need to rewatch The Gemsbok’s Video performing an existentialist reading of Fucking Dark Souls2, installed MullvadVPN3, and sideloaded whatever other apps I needed. The only reason I say it is almost figured out is I couldn’t bypass the Google account creation/login — an insufficient stopgap is to create a throwaway account, though it’s very hard to do this in a way that isn’t linked to your real identity, I think.
(This will be part of my “how to privify/securify your shit” series, if I ever learn to write.)
1: it isn’t
2: this sounds angry but it’s more pumped up, this shit rules
3: note that “block connections without VPN” is built into regular Android, but not Android TV, as far as I can tellI couldn’t bypass the Google account creation/login
That’s why I try really hard to avoid such things. I still try to (so far successfully) avoid having any Google-created operating systems anywhere in my home, because I trust them even less than Apple (for some years I used an AppleTV, but grew too frustrated with its limitations, and also Apple is becoming less and less trustworthy as well).
My solution currently: connected to an (older, non-smart) UST projector is a small HTPC (a little box from Asus based on an Intel N200, low power and fanless, but still has a GPU with a modern video decoding engine so it can decode even 4K video without issues). Since it’s a normal x86 system, I run a normal desktop Linux on it. To access streaming services, youtube, etc. I just use the web interfaces in Firefox. Big advantage of the setup is privacy, and best-in-class applications for playing local files (on streaming appliances that’s usually annoying and bad). And I can even watch broadcast TV on it with a USB DVB-T2 thingy, although I do that rarely these days.
Disadvantage: need to have desktopy computery input devices on the couch to use it (also have an IR receiver in there, but it’s not working well). Still, for me the upsides outweigh that downside.
I tried something similar with my Steam Deck (Bazzite + Gamescope works OKish) but I got tired of using a KB+M.
I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation. I have this old bullshit Amazon Fire HD 6 (Fire 6 HD? Who fucking names this shit?) that I am trying to fuck with and you can bypass connecting to the internet at all by
clicking any SSN → back → not now, so maybe it’s possible on some Android TV devices. Or maybe not and I can finally get around to reading Don Quixote.I will let you know if I figure out any way to bypass Google account creation.
Thanks :) Although I’m so far happy with my current setup.
I got tired of using a KB+M.
Using a mouse on the couch sucks, yeah. I still had an old unused Apple Magic Trackpad here, which (to my surprise) works perfectly with Linux, and with that it’s pretty nice.
That’s awesome. :)
tbh I think the “just vote with your wallet” strategy is probably insufficient. the flipside is that this means it requires people everywhere to start pushing back on this shit, across multiple countries. hard, but necessary
the positive side is that the outright harms of the tracking industry is more and more frequently becoming known to J Average person, so the fight may become easier
please drink verification can
In a hilarious turn of events that no one could have foreseen, Anthropic is having problems with people sending llm generated job applications, and is asking potential candidates to please not use ai.
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate ‘Yes’ if you have read and agree.
https://www.404media.co/anthropic-claude-job-application-ai-assistants/
A massive fan favorite in this community and CEO of a thermodynamics startup recently linked up with Grimes.
Nitter link: https://xcancel.com/BasedBeffJezos/status/1889072622409064649#m
It’s “Bond villain aesthetics” if the “villain” you mean is the big guy guarding the next location who acts intimidating for five seconds before Bond suplexes him and walks inside anyway, quipping.
Also, Grimes is not even offering table stakes for being a Bond girl here. Like, she’s an extra in the club through which Bond quickly passes in order to find the actual Bond girl. She’s not a vaguely trans-coded Famke Janssen bringing herself to orgasm by machine-gunning an entire room of technicians while Gottfried John looks on with a “what the fuck, tovarisch” eyebrow lift.
Like, if this guy gets a second scene, it’s the one where they demonstrate that SPECTRE does not tolerate failure.
holy shit that’s perfect
Substantially, uh, wider than I expected. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The bird flu is probably hitting that fellow’s diet hard.
a thermodynamics startup
what
Like what do they do, find ways to increase entropy faster? Or are they bootstrapping thermodynamics from first principles to disrupt the field of physics with blockchain-powered quantum synergy
IIRC, they were promising some new kind of processor with stochastic stuff in it that was advertised as “quantum computing” but isn’t really.
But he sure likes saying physics words.
I feel like there’s something to be said about how merely wearing a suit apparently means “Bond villain aesthetics”. Or is posing with a pretty young woman what makes the suit Bond villainy?
It’s probably because he’s a fatuous evil twat.
No, that’s not a new achievement for him.
I randomly remembered crying wolf and decided to make that everybodies problem
I had forgotten about that one. Thanks, I hate it.
I was already largely out of step with the Rats at this point, and I definitely hadn’t read it with the new “actually I feel like I was right about this one, neener neener” header. What strikes me now is the attitude here. Like, it takes a staggering degree of reflexive contrarianism to frame this as “see Trump isn’t that racist” instead of “hey look how fast the rest of the political establishment embraced this overt racism. Maybe we should have listened when everyone tries to tell us how racist the political establishment was underneath the respectable and reasonable public face”. Just because the wolves have taken off the wool suits now doesn’t mean they weren’t wolves the whole fucking time.
The header was written somewhere during the first Trump admin iirc. But for some reason he didnt add a year. (For people who worry a lot about epistemics and stuff like that another dumb move, imagine people reading that now and thinking he added that last year, it all aged a bit badly). Funny how every time he adds a header he makes it worse. See also his ‘i don’t believe a lot of this anymore’ header above the anti nrx post (which has a year).
IIRC this was the post that made Daniel Harper start his nazi-tracking podcast I Don’t Speak German
Speaking of non-german speakers, I hope poptart is doing alright. Haven’t heard anything of him since the blackout.
poptart is fine :-)
Thanks, fr!
That was literally the inflection point on my path to sneerclub. I had started to break from less wrong before, but I hadn’t reached the tipping point of saying it was all bs. And for ssc and Scott in particular I had managed to overlook the real message buried in thousands of words of equivocating and bad analogies and bad research in his earlier posts. But “you are still crying wolf” made me finally question what Scott’s real intent was.
Even if it wasn’t the seed of doubt about his real intentions, it also reveals how out of touch he is in a way (esp now 8 years later), and just how silly some LW stuff is. Like how they all want to be super-predictors, and try to keep notes on how good their prediction etc are, but how little all these other predictions matter when you make a mistake like this. “All this stuff about how [trump] is “the candidate of the KKK” and “the vanguard of a new white supremacist movement” is made up.” Also note that he [Scott/Trump/The LGBT person who wrote that text on the flag] didn’t notice that the lgbt flag was upside down.
I can’t find the exact quote because google has decayed into hot garbage juice, but there’s a line in Gideon the Ninth where Harrow asks Gideon how she thinks necromancy works exactly, and Gideon says something like, “I don’t know, maybe you think about bones really hard until something happens?”
That’s how LW people think actual intelligence works.
A good necromancer doesnt even need bones, he can create diamondoid undead just by looking at a picture of a blade of grass.
what if a future necromancer were to resurrect and torture all people who did not contribute to their eventual creation. I’m going to advocate for teaching necromancy in schools
Necromancers are just genetically better, they quickly keep up in conversations and they seem to sparkle(*), I suggest we make them the elites.
*: please ignore my detractors who keep pointing out this could also be because they snort bone dust. They are just a snarlbunch, and we have noticed the skulls already.
About the only good stuff LW does is remind me of other, much better SF. In this case Ian McDonald’s Necroville (Terminal Café in the US), about a future where nanotech enables the resurrection of the dead. Said neo-living are of course discriminated against, have no human rights, and are used as cheap disposable labor by the corporation that uses the technology.
Im now reminded of that dystopian short story of the first guy who uploaded his own mind (and how copies kept being abused, had no rights, went crazy when they figured out how much time had really past, and reliably got dementia after x years had past, just like the OG).
Yeah that’s “Lena” by the SCP guy. Great story.
MMAcevedo’s demeanour and attitude contrast starkly with those of nearly all other uploads taken of modern adult humans, most of which boot into a state of disorientation which is quickly replaced by terror and extreme panic. Standard procedures for securing the upload’s cooperation such as red-washing, blue-washing, and use of the Objective Statement Protocols are unnecessary.
from a discord. musk did not actually marry grimes, but apart from that my aplogies for mr beaning the whole america
Fingers crossed that the next domino is “nuclear holocaust due to particularly bad day on social media”
Sweet, everythings comin’ up swlabr
