this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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TechTakes

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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (21 children)

Has ESR always been antigay or is the latest ‘gays=pedo” spiel new?

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] sinedpick@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its ✨leadership principles✨, but this seems worse.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago

Didn’t corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 25 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Kicking off the sack with something light.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago (5 children)

I see RicksCEO.eth has since quietly removed the ".eth" part of his name. Presumably it was way more embarrassing than being a strip club tycoon.

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 25 points 1 week ago (12 children)

eigenrobot:

almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.

[–] istewart@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

why do we want people who can't deliver viable technology raising more kids?

why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Status. Also just a bit of kink and ‘proving’ heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).

[–] slopjockey@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I've gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago

eigen "I'll call it ironic if people call me on my shit" robot

[–] corbin@awful.systems 22 points 1 week ago

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Man, I didn't even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn't be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.

Like, there's plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it's not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And "generational insolvency" is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.

But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn't be taken seriously.

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones' embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google "chatgpt strawberry" and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you're still streered to marketing material.

Either way, I'm looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (6 children)

i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty

it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 20 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:

We're also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.

Firstly, if this is literally true they're completely fucking cooked.

Secondly, if it isn't, what version of it is?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (7 children)

from someone on Mastodon:

Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.

If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.

I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago (9 children)

NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle's latest video "Big Tech is Going Nuclear!" (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it's an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant "well, done with you" - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I'm sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago

Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said... this description text was generated by AI.

AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 18 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you're not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you're shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.

The new self-checkout process is as follows:

  1. Scan your item
  2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn't get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
  3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
  4. Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag "your... Item." Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
  5. GOTO 1

Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I've found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.

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[–] istewart@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency "executives."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We're all trying to find the guy who did this!

^more^ ^US^ ^politics^ ^I^ ^know.^ ^There^ ^is^ ^sadly^ ^no^ ^escape^ ^from^ ^the^ ^fiery^ ^vortex^ ^that^ ^is^ ^the^ ^U.S.^ ^election.^

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[–] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

russian dude generates botslop on dating apps, makes 5000+ girls talk to bot, chooses the one that stayed with chatgpt: https://xcancel.com/biblikz/status/1752335415812501757#m

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