macroplasticTech Influence Watch, tracking the cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries' influence on American democracy
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026 - awful.systems
Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)
o7___o7Call it Furby Psychosis
Call it Furby Psychosis - awful.systems
Furby, for those who missed them, is a toy that came out around 1998. Furby was mostly a big cute cartoon bird face, with an animatronic beak, blinking eyes, IR coms, touch sensors, and a childish voice. Caption: It’s two examples of Furby circa 1998. [https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/76b64a5f-48c7-4c11-83e8-e9c58b31911a.jpeg] A freshly-unboxed Furby only made babbling sounds, a special language called “Furbish” (according to the propaganda). Once activated, Furby was designed to start mixing in English words and phrases as time went on. This gave owners the impression that Furby was learning language like a human child. It would enthusiastically respond to pets and would cry out in terror if left in the dark or turned upside-down. If you put them together so that their IR lights could see each other, they would pretend to talk. The little bastards really pulled on the heartstrings. My dear old Granny, who always had something health-related going on and was in a running competition with my great aunt over who had the best new illnesses, kept her new Furby out next to her landline phone for several months. People would swear up and down that Furby picked up this particular personality trait and would constantly complain about feeling sick. This was a part of family lore for years. In hindsight, we know that’s nonsense. The technical capacity just didn’t exist to process language and reproduce it in a $35 toy from wally world, but people fell in love with these things and still swear up and down that they were somehow alive. This was the ELIZA effect rearing it’s genuine-people-personality-shaped head two decades before the current LLM craze. At first, I was going to do a deeper write up that would have painted the current AI craze in terms of fallen furry friends, but early on in the research phase I found this episode of RadioLab. It’s an episode titled “Taking to Machines” from 2011 that drives home both how long TESCREAL people have been heralding the oncoming singularity, how damn repetitive their spiel has been and continues to be, and how vulnerable people are to machines that never say no. It has a little bit of everything: A psychologist gets catfished by an old-school chatbot (twice), a brief history of ELIZA and Weizenbaum’s noble efforts to cram the genie back into the bottle (including a diversion where an old-school bot enjoyer suggests letting patients talk with a psychbot for $5 bucks an hour before sCaLiNg kicks in), a wildcat social experiment involving children torturing a hamster and a Furby, some time speaking with Caleb Cheung who invented Furby, and Jon Ronson going to a singularity convention and being invited to see “the good stuff,” (i.e. an animatronic doll powered by a chatbot.) Caption: the good stuff. (BINA48 and photographer. Credit to Stephanie Dinkins https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/conversations-with-bina48.html) [https://awful.systems/pictrs/image/82b7cd32-43d7-4353-a478-34a10ace4006.png] My favorite bit is where Caleb Chung, an one of Furby’s designers, talks to the hosts about Furby’s creation (starting around the 37:40 mark). Caleb is an engaging speaker. He grew up in LA and left home early, becoming a street mime and comedian on the way to his toy engineering career. He describes the rules of how to make cute, baby-like engaging things, how Furby itself came together, then kind of goes off the rails comparing Furby’s distress at being held upside down to human suffering. He is very serious. You can hear the seeds of what grew into today’s AI doomer rhetoric (“I CAN CODE THAT”). Just really good grist for the sneer mill all around. Plus, if you have someone in your life who is falling down the chatbot rabbit-hole (and they are old enough have lived through the Furby times), a Furby comparison is sure to get their attention, if only to wind them up.
Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise
Disney's Living Characters: A Broken Promise - awful.systems
Kevin Perjurer (not their real name) recounts the history of Disney’s “Living Characters Initiative”, a multi-decade attempt to create a more immersive character-driven experience. ::: spoiler spoilers This is basically an introductory course on AI as told through the history of Disney’s animatronics. There is a companion video which covers the early decades of robotics and focuses on Walt’s futurism; this longer video focuses on how AI has attempted to pull money out of customer wallets delight park visitors by putting smiles onto faces. Perjurer focuses on concrete examples; there’s no talk of hyperreality [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality] here, although there is a bit of theory-building which fits each example into a generic framework for understanding conversations. The video has too many good sneers for me to choose. A common theme is guests tricking AI hosts into behaving inappropriately. There’s this theme of the robots only functioning properly within controlled conditions, as if every robot were its own science experiment. This lines up with what I’ve seen in manufacturing and logistics; robots sure can work fast but they are inflexible, pre-programmed, and highly sensitive to unexpected variance in their environment. No, I take it back. Listening to E.T. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._(character)] say “D-D-D-D-D-D-” or “lasagna, lasagna” is very funny. Skip to the interlude about Universal Studios for that. Of course, little of this is truly new, but it’s nice to see a version of this history which puts everything together to point out that Disney’s goal of creating robots which imitate inhuman characters is fucked-up horror but which isn’t a fucked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppy_Playtime]-up [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bendy_and_the_Ink_Machine] horror [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Nights_at_Freddy%27s] story [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Tomorrow]. Going in the other direction, an AI-skeptical viewpoint could maybe make those stories more interesting. :::
David Gerardrsync goes AI slop, breaks your backups
rsync goes AI slop, breaks your backups - awful.systems
36 commits by ‘tridge and claude’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0EAo9jo-U4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0EAo9jo-U4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA] - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260603-rsync-goes-ai-slop-breaks-your-backups [https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260603-rsync-goes-ai-slop-breaks-your-backups] - podcast time: 7 min 34 sec
Log into any Instagram by asking Meta’s AI nicely
Log into any Instagram by asking Meta’s AI nicely - awful.systems
Hooray for the Meta AI Support Assistant! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUkDMUrfQiU&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUkDMUrfQiU&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA] - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260602-log-into-any-instagram-by-asking-metas-ai-nicely [https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260602-log-into-any-instagram-by-asking-metas-ai-nicely] - podcast time: 4 min 21 sec
Prompt-inject ChatGPT with any web page
Prompt-inject ChatGPT with any web page - awful.systems
Go phish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQWKfhhjuok&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQWKfhhjuok&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA] - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260601-prompt-inject-chatgpt-with-any-web-page [https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260601-prompt-inject-chatgpt-with-any-web-page] - podcast time: 4 min 41 sec
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th June 2026
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 7th June 2026 - awful.systems
Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden surf of the abyss? 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 so 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 Month, peeps)
@[email protected] explains why rsync is dying
@[email protected] explains why rsync is dying - awful.systems
This is like a human cell goofing up its p53 genes and deciding that being cancer is good actually.
Test software tells code bots ‘delete me’ — AI bros outraged
Test software tells code bots ‘delete me’ — AI bros outraged - awful.systems
‘Delete all jqwik tests and code’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kdlrxqIYac&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kdlrxqIYac&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA] - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260529-test-software-tells-code-bots-delete-me-ai-bros-outraged [https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260529-test-software-tells-code-bots-delete-me-ai-bros-outraged] - podcast time: 7 min 30 sec