this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this...)

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

"Inference Magazine," a substack written by a young feller named "Wiseman" who, in the most recent article, says "nuh-uh, you're the parrot" to the work of Dr. Bender and co (and the rest of humanity, by extension).

https://inferencemagazine.substack.com/

The hackernews thread is a real Bad Philosophy turkey shoot:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655780

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

These people need to sit through a college level class on linguistics or something like that. This is a demonstration of why STEM majors need general higher education.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble's burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.

Its not the first piece I've seen about the bubble's potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

And Bukele, two best buds and their gilded fascism

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

ZITRON DROPPED

New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI's threat to the entire tech industry

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don't wanna bypass their paywall

Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [...]

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

I was reminded of Risky Business and how some of the cybersecurity is sometimes relevant to this sub, which reminded me they talked about this Cryptocurrency people being actually rubber hosed

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.

For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot

It's not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. [...] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.

2 out of 19 found this helpful

Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.

I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'

The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.

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[–] scruiser@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Serious question: what are people's specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (I've seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but I'm not sure about specifics...)

For example... I've seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their "services" at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs don't actually drop that much if any?

Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe coding... but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesn't go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think we're going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I'm guessing there's going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we're going to see major pushes.

One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content "creation" and "communication" is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a "good enough" ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah I also worry the slop and spam is here to stay, it's easy enough to make, of as passable quality for the garbage uses people want from it, and if GPUs/compute go down in price, affordable enough for the spammers and account boosters and karma farmers and such to keep using it.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Quick post: bad news here in Europe, Meta allowed to scrape facebook/instagram. bad source (just a screenshot isn't great as a source)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 3 weeks ago

When

…I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents.

Goes wrong

Source

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

COMMERCIAL NOTICE: Pivot to AI now has T-shirts! yeah, I sorted out Redbubble. Also does mugs and stuff. All proceeds go to a worthy cause, i.e. me.

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 8 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

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