Mastodawn

Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems

https://awful.systems/post/4954578

Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th July 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems

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.)

blakestacey Jul 14, 2025

Previously sneered:

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

More recently, in the comments:

After reading your comments and @Jiro 's below, and discussing with LLMs on various settings, I think I was too strong in saying…

It’s like watching people volunteer for a lobotomy.

Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025 - awful.systems

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 4th July in advance…I guess.)

blakestacey Jul 14, 2025

ChatGPT has already broken marriages, and hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.

And suddenly I realized that I never want to hear a Rationalist say the words “mating pool”.

(I fired up xcancel to see if any of the usual suspects were saying anything eminently sneerable. Yudkowsky is re-xitting Hanania and some random guy who believes in g. Maybe he should see if the Pioneer Fund will bankroll publicity for his new book…)

swlabr Jul 14, 2025

mating pool

probably on par with the other stuff you might see at a rationalist poly compound

V0ldek Jul 14, 2025

hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool.

Wasn’t the “problem” that there’s too many men in the mating pool and women are “alphamaxxing” or whatever the fuck to get the highest quality dick? Shouldn’t this be a good thing for incels like Hanania.

Alex Jul 14, 2025

hot AI girls are on track to remove a lot of men from the mating pool

Can’t remove them if they were never in it.

Soyweiser Jul 14, 2025

Good news for women, less risk of the pool needing to be drained because someone crapped in it again.

froztbyte Jul 14, 2025

nasb, new torres piece out, promising title and opening

(I’ll have to read it after done with my present other currency-related diversions. old-man-shakes-fist-at-cloud.gif)

Digital Eugenics and the Extinction of Humanity

If we are to combat the AI industry’s push to build digital gods, we have to understand the ideology of the antihumanist project, writes Dr. Émile P. Torres.

Tech Policy Press

TinyTimmyTokyo Jul 14, 2025

I like his new framing of the accelerationists and transhumanists as pro-extinctionists.

blakestacey Jul 14, 2025

I like how quoting Grimes lyrics makes the banality of these people thuddingly clear.

V0ldek Jul 14, 2025

I wanna be software The best design Infinite princess Computer mind

Substituting this for the text whenever I see Sammy Boy say something again

YourNetworkIsHaunted Jul 15, 2025

I think it’s a better way of framing things than the TESCREALs themselves use, but it still falls into the same kind of science fiction bucket imo. Like, the technology they’re playing with is nowhere near close to the level of full brain emulation or mind-machine interface or whatever that you would need to make the philosophical concerns even relevant. I fully agree with what Torres is saying here, but he doesn’t mention that the whole affair is less about building the Torment Nexus and more about deflecting criticism away from the real and demonstrable costs and harms of the way AI systems are being deployed today.

scruiser Jul 15, 2025

Those opening Peter Thiel quotes… Thiel uses talks about (in a kind of dated and maybe a bit offensive) trans people, to draw the comparison to transhumanists wanting to change themselves more extensively. The disgusting irony is that Thiel has empowered the right-wing ecosystem, which is deeply opposed to trans rights.

bitofhope Jul 17, 2025

I’ve always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I’m the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he’s saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that’s just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he’s talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.

Seminar2250 Jul 14, 2025

thinking about how often code will be like

[-1] * len(array) # -1 is a place holder because I don't know the vocabulary word "sentinel value"

and justified because “it just needs to work”

and now we have professional vibe coders

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguish

Anguish - Wikipedia

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting “The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI”

The Biggest Insult

The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI

What We Lost

swlabr Jul 14, 2025

found on reddit. posted without further comment

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably won’t be filling those positions any time soon.

As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.

Steve Jul 14, 2025

My new video about the anti-design of the tech industry where I talk about this little passage from an ACM article that set me off when I found it a few years back.

In short, before software started eating all the stuff “design” meant something. It described a process of finding the best way to satisfy a purpose. It was a response to the purpose.

The tech industry takes computation as being an immutable means and finds purposes it may satisfy. The purpose is a response to the tech.

p.s. sorry to spam. :)

vid: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ollyMSWSWOY pod: pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/…/tech-as-anti-design

threads bsky: bsky.app/profile/…/3ltwles4hkk2t masto: hci.social/@fasterandworse/114852024025529148

Dispatch #29: Tech As Anti-Design

YouTube

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

The curl Bug Bounty is getting flooded with slop, and the security team is prepared to do something drastic to stop it. Going by this specific quote, reporters falling for the hype is a major issue:

As a lot of these reporters seem to genuinely think they help out, apparently blatantly tricked by the marketing of the AI hype-machines, it is not certain that removing the money from the table is going to completely stop the flood. We need to be prepared for that as well. Let’s burn that bridge if we get to it.

Death by a thousand slops

I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down. On the contrary, it seems that we have recently not only received more AI slop but also more human slop. The latter … Continue reading Death by a thousand slops →

daniel.haxx.se

________Jul 14, 2025

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports are opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”. Oh but for sure it’s broken and you are expert enough to know? One of the examples the reporter kept replying with how a strcpy() could be unsafe and the curl devs were kindly explaining that yes in general that function has potential for issues but their usage was not such a case. Reporter just repeats without paying attention. Insanity.

I love working in systems writing C and assembly but I’ve grown many gray hairs over the years being yelled at that “C is the worst” or “lol memory bug” or the classic “this thing isn’t working perfectly for me so it must have been written in C and we need to rewrite it entirely in (alpha) language which is for sure better than the collective centuries of expertise in C existing now”. These LLMs sure do amplify these obnoxious voices because now the fancy chatbot says so.

BlueMonday1984 Jul 15, 2025

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”

At that point, I feel the team would be justified in telling these slop-porters to go fuck themselves and closing the report - they’ve made it crystal clear they’re beyond saving.

(And on a wider note, I suspect the security team is gonna be a lot less willing to give benefit of the doubt going forward, considering the slop-porters are actively punishing them for doing so)

________Jul 15, 2025

It’s unfortunate that the bug bounty payout removal is probably the best immediate remedy for some filtering but with curl being everywhere resume padders are still going to rush to generate slop reports or patches. I hope they are more fast and direct with communication as well. Their current patience and politeness is admirable.

self Jul 14, 2025

404media posted an article absolutely dunking on the idea of pivoting to AI, as one does:

media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasn’t worked

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work

AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

404 Media

blakestacey Jul 14, 2025

We—yes, even you—are using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already

Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between “LLMs” and “machine learning”, but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.

antifuchs Jul 14, 2025

It’s distressingly pervasive: autocorrect, speech recognition (not just in voice assistants, in accessibility tools), image correction in mobile cameras, so many things that are on by default and “helpful”

istewart Jul 14, 2025

Apparently, for some corporate customers, Outlook has automatically turned on AI summaries as a sidebar in the preview pane for inbox messages. No, nobody I’ve talked to finds this at all helpful.

bitofhope Jul 17, 2025

A thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by “summaries” I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.

“Worse than useless” would be an understatement.

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

This is pure speculation, but I suspect machine learning as a field is going to tank in funding and get its name dragged through the mud by the popping of the bubble, chiefly due to its (current) near-inability to separate itself from AI as a concept.

o7___o7 Jul 14, 2025

Gang initiation for insufferable dorks

nightsky Jul 14, 2025

I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.

It’s something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And I’m not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, it’s the websites themselves.)

Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.

On a product page I then saw:

Material: gefühlt

This was very strange… because that makes no sense at all. “Gefühlt” is a form (participle) of the verb “fühlen”, which means “to feel”. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.

So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense “to feel” as “felt”. And of course “felt” can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called “Filz”), so it’s a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context they’re in.

And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.

And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! It’s unbearable. At least there’s a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shit^tm^ and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.

gerikson Jul 14, 2025

I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.

nightsky Jul 14, 2025

Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.

istewart Jul 14, 2025

An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions

nightsky Jul 14, 2025

btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.

fullsquare Jul 14, 2025

aliexpress did that forever but you can just set display language once and you’re done. the most annoying shit in this genre are imo ai-scraped, ai-translated and ai-dubbed videos on yt that you have to flip switches once per video to get rid of , unless uploader switches it off (it’s opt-out). do i have to mention that it’s absolutely dogshit and unlistenable

Soyweiser Jul 14, 2025

Ah, im not the only one, yes very annoying. I wonder if there isn’t also a setting they can ask the browsers about the users preferred language usage. Like how you can change languages on a windows install and some installers/etc follow that preferred language.

Sailor Sega Saturn Jul 15, 2025

Click here if you want a horribly bad translation in your face

HedyL Jul 15, 2025

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

This really gets on my nerves too. They probably came up with the idea that they could increase time spent on their platforms and thus revenue by providing more content in their users’ native languages (especially non-English). Simply forcing it on everyone, without giving their users a choice, was probably the cheapest way to implement it. Even if this annoys most of their user base, it makes their investors happy, I guess, at least over the short term. If this bubble has shown us anything, it is that investors hardly care whether a feature is desirable from the users’ point of view or not.

fullsquare Jul 15, 2025

if it’s opt-out, it also keeps use of the shitty ai dubbing high thus making it an artficial use case. it’s like with gemini counting every google search as single use of it

antifuchs Jul 16, 2025

Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as “Bleib für immer am Leben”, guess they named it “Stay Forever Live”? No way to know for sure, of course.

BlueMonday1984 Jul 14, 2025

Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:

You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.

Andrew Sterian (@steriana.bsky.social)

I am the opposite. I think it's only a matter of time before people realize that humans are just biological "AI products". Emotions, guilt, pride, self-awareness: just good programming. And it can be replicated in electronics instead of biology.

Bluesky Social

YourNetworkIsHaunted Jul 14, 2025

I’m not comfortable saying that consciousness and subjectivity can’t in principle be created in a computer, but I think one element of what this whole debate exposes is that we have basically no idea what actions makes consciousness happen or how to define and identify that happening. Chatbots have always challenged the Turing test because they showcase how much we tend to project consciousness into anything that vaguely looks like it (interesting parallel to ancient mythologies explaining the whole world through stories about magic people). The current state of the art still fails at basic coherence over shockingly small amounts of time and complexity, and even when it holds together it shows a complete lack of context and comprehension. It’s clear that complete-the-sentence style pattern recognition and reproduction can be done impressively well in a computer and that it can get you farther than I would have thought in language processing, at least imitatively. But it’s equally clear that there’s something more there and just scaling up your pattern-maximizer isn’t going to replicate it.

hrrrngh Jul 14, 2025

Sanders why gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsda…

Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.

. . .

Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.

taking a wild guess it’s Yudkowsky. “very knowledgeable people” and “many/most experts” is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.

even among people critical of AI (who don’t otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it’s frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I’m more nitpicking than anything because it’s not usually their most important issue, and maybe it’s useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I’m not really familiar with Bernie Sanders’ takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don’t know if that makes sense, I’m very tired

Bernie Sanders Reveals the AI 'Doomsday Scenario' That Worries Top Experts

The Vermont senator discusses his fears that artificial intelligence will only enrich the billionaire class, the fight for a 32-hour work week, and the ‘doomsday scenario’ that has some of the world’s top experts deeply concerned.

Gizmodo

mountainriver Jul 15, 2025

Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the “AI” into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.

Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.

gerikson Jul 14, 2025

Haven’t really kept up with the pseudo-news of VC funded companies acquiring each other, but it seems Windsurf (previously been courted by OpenAI) is now gonna be purchased by the bros behind Devin.

flaviat Jul 15, 2025

rsyslog goes “AI first”, for what reason? no one knows.

Opening ipython greeted me with this: “Tip: IPython 9.0+ has hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.”

I wish open source projects would stop doing this.

rsyslog Goes AI First — A New Chapter Begins - rsyslog

After 24 months of focused evaluation and careful experimentation, we’re excited to announce a major shift in the evolution of rsyslog: we’re going AI First. For those who love more details, please the the more in-depth description of AI First. This marks the beginning of a strategic transformation in how we design, develop, and support […]

rsyslog

nightsky Jul 15, 2025

rsyslog goes “AI first”

what

Thanks for the “from now on stay away from this forever” warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (“how AI is shaping the future of logging”), I have to remind myself it’s a syslog daemon.

froztbyte Jul 15, 2025

I would’ve stan’d syslog-ng but they’ve also been pulling some fuckery with docs again lately that’s making me anxious, so I’m very :|||||

froztbyte Jul 15, 2025

thescream.tiff

BlueMonday1984 Jul 15, 2025

Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source

Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I’m not sure it can recover from.

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects' infrastructure, and it's getting worse.

LibreNews

fullsquare Jul 15, 2025

that and deluge of fake bug reports

BlueMonday1984 Jul 15, 2025

The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSS’ capacity to find and fix bugs.

Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by “a vicious cycle leading to collapse”, and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:

Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.

That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus

Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

gerikson Jul 15, 2025

yeah but have you considered how much it’s worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???

________Jul 15, 2025

I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.

o7___o7 Jul 15, 2025

Don’t know if llms will kill it, but they sure is a kick-in-the-dick

aio Jul 15, 2025

the announcement post is obviously LLM-generated as well

V0ldek Jul 16, 2025

It’s extremely annoying everywhere. GitHub’s updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.

For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? It’s amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only bother’s to tell me about their revolutionary features of “please spam me with useless PRs” and… make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?

arbitraryidentifier Jul 21, 2025

ugh, why would i want a summary of a pull request? the whole point of reviewing a pull request is checking the details to make sure it’s not missing something important or doing something wrong.

funbreaker Jul 19, 2025

My favorite static site generator, Marmite, is now making Special Accomodations for AI bros by making a context file? The dev is making all of his PRs with Claude.