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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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

"In hindsight, CFAR co-founder Anna Salamon told NBC, “we were creating conditions for a cult.”", if only there had been people warning about this, sadly such a club didn't exist. Anyway, im sure this will lead to them reflecting and changing things.

Source "Two Vegan Lovers, an AI ‘Cult,’ and a Trail of Dead Bodies", Archive

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

With the collapse of the US empire and hegemony in progress wonder if they actually did something with this or if it is all another thought experiment.

E: wow that users posts history is something. Drops that article 3 years ago. Silence till some weird comment (directly addressing yud claiming they had some big breakthrough, about the mind state of the zizians of course. And it is all speculation and way too verbose).

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago (1 children)

hey "way too verbose" is a free space

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

Yes you are right and it wasnt even that bad, the footnote was only half the length of a 'who build this old roman wall?' footnote.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ah a food related charity that is important wonder what they did with the millions, ah release papers. That is ...

[–] maol@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Planning for securing food in a nuclear winter? What a great wheeze. If your advice isn't any good, nobody can tell until there's a nuclear winter, and if there is a nuclear winter they won't exactly be able to ask for their money back because they'll be too busy dying of radiation sickness.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Remember the apocalypse slop buckets the rightwing grifto sphere kept trying to sell?

[–] maol@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I do indeed. A bucket always seemed like pretty poor.protection from the end of the world, even if it was full of purified water and high protein MREs and whatever else. I suppose you could put it on your head and make like Ned Kelly

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 20 points 6 days ago

404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered

It's a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don't have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

I really didn't think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, "an insult to life itself".

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

It really sucks so much how many coders embrace it. At my work, there is the looming introduction of code LLMs very soon, and I'm anxious to learn how many of my colleagues will happily use it, and the consequences it will have for me to deal with the results (and generally, how it will make me feel to work in an environment where these tools are embraced). I was hoping that the corporate bureaucracy would be slow enough that the AI bubble collapses before it's allowed to use the tools, but unfortunately management put a lot of pressure behind it and it all went faster than expected :(

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

not every programmer posts to social media...

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Id say a lot of the better ones dont at least not regularly (in my exp), did hear from one of those that they had a problem with new hires, some lf them have very random output quality wise, until they get fired for using llms for everything.

[–] mii@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Our company is currently looking for a new programmer and we've interviewed a few so far. I don't want to generalize but it really seems that a non-negligible part of the younger ones at least tries to use LLMs to make up for a lack or experience, and that really shows.

I normally don't like doing programming challenges during an interview because they have little to no real-world connections, but I've been throwing small questions around lately just to see what people do, and how they approach them, and there's a subset of people who will say, "I would ask ChatGPT now" in those scenarios.

I haven't met a vibe-coder in real life yet, but I'm afraid it's only a matter of time.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 16 points 6 days ago (3 children)
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Not sure why anyone thought CS as a community can "save us". It's just as likely to be red/black-pilled (gold/black-pilled?) as any other heavily male tech adjacent community. The idea that nerds should be politically liberal because they were bullied in 80 high-school comedies is ludicrous.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

No, I'm sure this time we can identify the person or people who are divinely anointed to exercise absolute power over everyone.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago

His name is Scott.

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[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 13 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

article about the tactics that felon employs against the women bearing his children

features some notable sentences from his fixer, too. the sort of shit that just barely doesn’t qualify as him threatening to top off your kneecaps

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Do note how this legion of kid slaves shit shows how he both doesnt believe will go to mars nor that ai/robots can automate things.

You dont make new children to save civilization in 18+ years if you think in 2 years you will go to mars/build robots that automate everything/build the robotgod.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

oh yeah he's way too much of a coward to go to mars. besides, no-one there he could dominate or hurt

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

Eurgh!

Musk seems like he's 1cm away from Jeffrey Epstein.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

idk when i'll have better opportunity to post this

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Isn't it more grammatically correct to say "Jeffreys Epstein"?

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

I thought we all knew the proper collective noun was a creepful of epsteins

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 18 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

previous stubsack guest star Cursor rejoins the show, using a shitty liarsynth to automatically tell users broken behaviour is expected (cw: orange site), followed by people mass-killing their subscriptions

Earlier today Cursor, the magical AI-powered IDE started kicking users off when they logged in from multiple machines. Like,you’d be working on your desktop, switch to your laptop, and all of a sudden you're forcibly logged out. No warning, no notification, just gone.

Naturally, people thought this was a new policy.

So they asked support.

And here’s where it gets batshit: Cursor has a support email, so users emailed them to find out. The support peson told everyone this was “expected behavior” under their new login policy

One problem. There was no support team, it was an AI designed to 'mimic human responses'

haven’t gotten into the replies to look for sneers yet but I bet there will be some

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

That feels like a fitting ironic fate, a company selling AI slopcode generation looses a bunch of users from believing their own bullshit and using an LLM as customer support. Hopefully that story repeated a few dozen times across other businesses and the business majors stop pushing LLM usage.

Edit... looking at the orange site comments... some unironically cited Anthropic ~~research~~ marketing hype, which (correctly) shows "Chain-of-Thought" is often bullshit unrelated to the final answer (but it's Anthropic, so the label it as deception and unfaithfulness instead of the entire approach being bullshit in general).

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

No more CVEs, so I guess that means no more vulnerabilities, the computer security crisis is solved, who knew it would be that easy!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Wtf

E: it might have been fixed, now only if they also fixed all the other things. Erugh hate how much they are offloading the 'is this valuable' thing on just how mad (and who) people are getting. Such an extreme social cost (but very 'X but on the blockchain!' techbro style offloading of the costs unto others)

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

I hope that either way the opportunity will be taken to move this all to a safer/independent footing.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 6 days ago (2 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 6 days 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

[–] mlen@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago

Meta claims they have approval. No comments from regulators in sight, no actual decision quoted.

It's not necessarily false, but it does come from the lie and break laws industry, so I wouldn't be surprised if it is a lie.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago

this URL is the PDF of the NVCA-Pitchbook Venture Capital Monitor for Q1 2025

the Q3 2024 report was comedy gold, using word mangling to present bad news as okay news

i expect this one to be more of the same

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