Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    6 months ago

    thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like “OpenAI” and “google deepmind,” their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.

    also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was “the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs.”

    finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      it’s like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

      hell of a stinger

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    The Death of the Junior Developer

    Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there’s no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we’ll have AGI by then and it’ll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer’s time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Funny, as I also assume LLMs will cause the death of the Junior Developer, but not because the job dissapears, but because due to relying on LLMs devs never really build the skills to understand software and will suck so hard people will not hire them for the junion -> senior positions. And it gets even worse for the junior dev when the LLMs enshittify (either by the output degrading or the deal altering more and more pray they don’t alter the deal further).

      Guess the difference of opinion here is calling people who use LLMs junior devs vs calling them senior devs.

      I’m oddly reminded of the person who used copilot to write a script to do something (which they offered to others), and didn’t know what http errors meant. (they just asked the LLM how to fix it).

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Wait there are people who cannot use the command line. No wait again, don’t answer that please.

              • self@awful.systemsEnglish
                1·
                6 months ago

                having seen the horror from a distance: VNC, a fuckton of clicking, occasionally mouse and keyboard macros, possibly a networked KVM (itself not a bad idea at all for emergency access to hardware too commodity or misdesigned to have a sensible serial console, but we’re talking day to day here), and a massive chip on their shoulder about being forced off their beloved Windows Server 2003 and onto Linux

                • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
                  1·
                  6 months ago

                  How do they sysadmin a server that doesn’t have any display devices aside from the terminal then? Which in my experience is almost all of them?

                • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
                  1·
                  6 months ago

                  I have had the actually quite heartwarming experience of us hiring on a serious NT BOFH (someone who knows precisely how to wave a hammer at NT to intimidate it) and he sees how Linux does stuff and is trepidatious but eventually delighted

                  then there are others

                  i’m at like the pointy-clicky stage with NT admin and sometimes it’s just not enough, cos it’s Babby’s First OS but with several layers of tentacles underneath

        • Mike Knell@blat.at
          1·
          6 months ago

          @dgerard @Soyweiser I thought we were SREs now. At least, the message for years was “Sysadmins are useless shit now because they aren’t software engineers and hell, they don’t even call themselves engineers”.

            • Mike Knell@blat.at
              1·
              6 months ago

              @dgerard Sometimes I feel like a hospital doctor who’s worked in the clap clinic for decades and has had a series of name badges starting with “Venereal Disease” and passing through “Special Clinic” on the way to “Sexual Health Clinic”. Same thankless job, just different labels.

              • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
                1·
                6 months ago

                I don’t feel like any great shakes as a sysadmin, then I encounter someone with the same job title who has clearly never used a command line before

              • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
                1·
                6 months ago

                Same basic lessons, too… “consider the risks of giving root privileges to people you just met”, etc.

    • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      this is such a sad slop. i wouldn’t guess it’s yegge, it’s so far from his style when he used to write himself.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.

      As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

      Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

    With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding, there’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.

    Watch the entire interview if you’re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

    • Eiim@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled “do not scrape except for search engine indexing” is a “gray area” with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that’s exactly what it says not to do!

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Never thought I’d see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Here’s the whole thing from that great quote. Sorkin is not a hard-hitting interviewer, but he just asks the incredibly obvious questions and Suleyman swerves and dodges like a MF while pronouncing at him in an English listen-to-me-you-pleb voice.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      He isn’t totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.

    • 200fifty@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

      Ew… stay away from my content, you creep!

  • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    What do normal people - people who don’t pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?

    Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it’s the latest kid’s movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can’t figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from “HBD Chick”.

    And I’m like okay, that has to be “happy birthday, right?”. Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.

    Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don’t follow her or anybody that follows her, there’s literally no connection or personal interest.

    I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site’s gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I’m surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I assume some PR departments of potential advertisers saw that and went ‘lower the twitter spend more!’, I’m imaging the Futurama joke where Fry talks to investors while stock price tally is running live behind him.

          • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            Twitter’s main issue is that it’s not really very big. It wasn’t big even pre-Musk. If you have the choice between advertising on a really big social network (Meta (=FB, IG, Whatsapp…)) with a functioning trust & safety team and ad brokers who take you seriously and don’t accuse you of being woke, and one which has way smaller reach, no T&S to speak of, and whose owner can use his outsized influence to call your CEO a pedo whenever the ketamine kicks in, the choice is clear.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        It’s pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      First of all, most of my “normal” acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.

      Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.

      I had one friend last week in a group chat go “Twitter is so racist nowadays innit”, to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded “you’re right” and stopped.

    • slopjockey@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Note: all the talk I mention is online talk. Nobody in my irl life talks about social media dynamics ever, thank GOD

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Only time non-online people I know IRL talk about it is when they ask me the most basic of basic stuff.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I wish I knew any normal people so I could give input.

      Personally my Twitter pre-Elon was pretty curated. I never really “got” a big part of it unless it spilled over in other channels (I never heard of “Black people Twitter” on Twitter, only from Buzzfeed or similar). I also disengaged from US political Twitter hard after the 2016 election. So it’s possible I could still be using it and swearing over bots etc. without being overly affected, but I locked my account as an act of principle shortly after he took over.

      • carlitoscohones@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Same here - I had a very small universe curated for myself. I didn’t leave immediately, but when I did, there were a whole lot more weird ads and bots and stuff in my feed. I think that I only ever saw prøn once, and I was actually shocked that it even existed on Twitter.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    previously

    presently:

    (you can turn it off but in typical fashion: sneaky new setting, default-on, way to make it turn off is hidden in settings instead of a direct “no fuck this” button. same shit twitter and fb pulled for years)

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      double kicker is that the opt-out settings have been been in “No, do not use my data” for months

      discord feedback: “Thank you for sharing your concerns. We understand your frustration regarding ads in the client. Discord continuously explores various features and changes to enhance the user experience, including the possibility of advertisements. As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client. We appreciate your feedback and will make sure to pass it along to our development team.”

      • self@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        As of now, having a Nitro subscription does not exempt users from seeing ads in the client.

        wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again? is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments?

        I ask, having instantly closed the nitro ads discord regularly pushes to my client cause the feature list looks roundly annoying and irrelevant to how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium, DMs, and an annual game of Quake)

        • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          wait what’s the fucking point of nitro again?

          Remember when people used to smugly say ‘unless you pay for it, you are the product’ turns out you always are the product!

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          is it seriously just the ability to use more annoying reactions and upload slightly larger attachments

          and server boosts! (and better video quality I guess?)

          irunno the whole mechanic is a bit weird but I’ve been “okay” with it in the sense that at least it meant discord was getting revenue from rich-enough gamers and that would mean they didn’t have to suck on the VC nozzle. ostensibly.

          like I would’ve likely never bought nitro for myself because idgaf about the featureset, but I would consider it if it meant no ads. alas.

          how I use the app (open source project docs that only exist in this completely inappropriate medium

          yeah. god. it hurts how many projects have done this shit. and now I bet that exact fucking thing I predicted may start coming around…

          also, slack, ~1h ago:

          Free workspace content older than one year will be deleted

          Your workspace, <snip> , is on a free Slack plan. This workspace has content that is older than one year which will be deleted once the policy takes effect. Moving forward, Slack will not retain messages and files older than one year for a workspace. This policy will impact your workspace starting August 26th, 2024.

          the ouroboros must be hungry.

    • hrrrngh@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I hate that I saw that same post earlier today

      Here’s a quote from the book:

      AI already transcends human perception — in a sense, through chronological compression or “time travel”: enabled by algorithms and computing power, it analyzes and learns through processes that would take human minds decades or even centuries to complete.

      Glad to know the calculators I had in school were capable of time travel

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Isn’t it absolutely deranged? These people have (well had lol) real power over us.

        There is a great March 2023 episode of Trashfuture I’m listening to atm called “The Diet of Brainworms” about this book. They basically want to install feudalism and tech-priests because AI is sO pOwErFuLl.

        One of the hosts (Riley iirc) made a great point that it’s as if someone showed Kissenger that trick where you write “boobs” using a calculator, and he became deeply unsettled by the computer’s power of speech. Also appreciated the one about Kissenger being the guy who used an etch-a-sketch to draw a gun and was scared of it.

  • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the “New” button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it’s a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.

    • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      I recently learned there is a page showing just the comments of the communities you are subscribed to; that works for me because this space is so incredibly low-traffic, but I guess falls apart if you use that account to follow higher-traffic chatter.

  • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I’m featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt

    … which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast

    According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value

    tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren’t foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.

      Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

        I’ve thought about this a bunch in the past, and tbh the only answer I’ve come to over many forms of it is “fuck the fucking USA”

        it’s a place that is structurally built to allow for that kind of evasion and abuse to happen

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          As long as line goes up nobody knows how rich the perps will be.

          And if you don’t know how rich the perps will be, how will you know if and how hard they should be punished?

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”

      Questions asked by the terminally deranged.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        Or somebody looking for ‘the worst posts online’ cringe compilation. Musks CEOs must be able to build their companies products not be able to read spreadsheets was a good example.