this post was submitted on 01 Jun 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. Also, happy Pride :3)

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[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)
[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago

Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo's jumping headfirst into it.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago

The only thing gen ai is good for is being a stick to threaten labor with.

[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 32 points 5 days ago (6 children)

OT: I GOT THE JOB HOLY SHIT

[–] self@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago

congrats, that’s awesome news!

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

Nice! I hope the work is some combination of meaningful, rewarding and well compensated!

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago

Congrats! :D

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[–] rook@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago (2 children)

For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it's clear that they're not aware of the issue enough right now.

There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we're not qualified and it never goes well.

AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

reddit sneerclub had some of those. I deleted the comments and banned the users with "sorry, we really aren't equipped to help you"

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

stop it, get some help.pdf

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 11 points 5 days ago

damn we've got cyberpsychos before gta 6

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

hackernews enthusiast tpacek is filled with incredulity when some friends won't join his new religious movement. This of course has triggered a 1200 reply long thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163063

[–] FredFig@awful.systems 10 points 5 days ago

This almost reads like tptacek doesn't understand why lucidity's piece a year ago was so effective and tried to write it from the opposite angle by punching down instead of punching up.

I'd have thought that a guy who writes on the internet like it's a competition sport could recognize the obvious problems of this, but maybe I'm just a vibe coding Youtuber.

[–] self@awful.systems 14 points 5 days ago (3 children)

I feel like this article might deserve its own post, because I think it’s the first time I’ve ever seen an attempted counter-sneer. it’s written like someone’s idea of what a sneer is (tpacek swears sometimes and says he doesn’t give a shit! so many paragraphs into giving a shit!) but all the content is awful bootlicking and points that don’t stand up to even mild scrutiny? and now I’m wondering if tpacek’s been reading us and that’s why he’s upset, or if this is what an LLM shits out if you ask it to write critihype in the tone of a sneer

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago

Special bootlicking points:

Source: xcancel.com

@PITLORDMOSH: weirdly dev-hostile take for a company blog

@tqbf (The author of the blogpost): I tried to post it on my personal blog and Kurt wouldn't let me.

For reference Kurt is the CEO of the company that the author works for: https://archive.md/Z2xvg

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I bet you're right on the money.

Edit: someone deep in the thread dared him to post a video of one of his coding speedruns if it's so good, which tickled me

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

fly.io is closed source, of course he's not gonna show you the engineering excellence. trust me bro, you fool, you poltroon,

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

(e: wtf, phone client posted to subthread despite top reply arrow icon. bug bug buuuuug. the jank is ever present)

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's a whole lotta words to say "I'm a bad programmer who aspires to be a bad manager of a team of programmers."

[–] mawhrin@awful.systems 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

he's not a bad programmer, which is part of the problem here.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I guess that's fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he's taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, "get gud". This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).

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[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 8 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Not high on the list of thought crimes, but a particular ick for me:

Also: 100% of all the Bash code you should author ever again

Why the bash hate?

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago

Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Fr, eschewing the command line is the cs guy version of not being able to change a flat tire

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 18 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Also, happy Pride :3

Yes, happy pride month everyone!

I've decided that this year I'm going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows... wonder if anyone will notice.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 4 points 4 days ago
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 9 points 5 days ago

I’m helping with the church pride gloat, but I’m not going to signal anything because I honestly feel its not safe to.

Hell yeah!

Seems there's a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I've been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.

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

another good piece from 404, teachers being real unhappy with the tsunami of bullshit autoplag has loaded them with

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