Want to wade into the snowy 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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
@BlueMonday1984 Signal gives spinning out a spin: <https://confer.to/blog/2025/12/confessions-to-a-data-lake/>
one thing i did not see coming, but should have (i really am an idiot): i am completely unenthused whenever anyone announces a piece of software. iāll see something on the rust subreddit that i would have originally thought āthatās coolā and now my reaction is āgreat, gotta see if an llm was usedā
everything feels gloomy.
So, Copilot for VSCode apparently got hit with an 8.8 CVE in November for, well, doing Copilot stuff. (RCE if you clone a strange repo and promptfondle it.)
Fixes were allegedly released on Nov 12th, but I canāt find anything in the Changelog on what those changes were, and how they would prevent Copilot from doing, well, Copilot stuff. (Although I may not be ITSec-savvy enough to know where such information would be found.)
Skynetās backstory is somehow very predictable yet came as a surprise to me in the form of this headline by the Graudain: āMuskās AI tool Grok will be integrated into Pentagon networks, Hegseth saysā.
The article doesnāt provide much more other than exactly what youād expect. E.g this Hegseth quote, emphasis mine: āmake all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and componentā.
Me as a kid: āhow could they have been so incompetent and let Skynet take over?!ā
Me now: āOh. Yeah. That checks outā
Found a solid sneer on the 'net today: https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/on-floss-and-training-llms/
my promptfondler coworker thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process and I think Iām starting to have visions of teddy k
thinks that he should be in charge of all branch merges because he doesnāt understand the release process
ā¦I donāt want you to dox yourself but I am abyss-staringly curious
I am still processing this while also spinning out. One day I will have distilled this into something I can talk about but yeah Iām going through it ngl
i am continuously reminded of the fact that the only things the slop machine is demonstrably good at ā not just passable, but actively helpful and not routinely fucking up at ā is āgenerate getters and settersā
A feature that every IDE has been able to do for you for two decades now
OpenTofu scripts for a PostgreSQL server
statement dreamed up by the utterly deranged. Theyāve played us for fools
(One of) The authors of AI 2027 are at it again with another fantasy scenario: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ykNmyZexHESFoTnYq/what-happens-when-superhuman-ais-compete-for-control
I think they have actually managed to burn through their credibility, the top comments on /r/singularity were mocking them (compared to much more credulous takes on the original AI 2027). And the linked lesswrong thread only has 3 comments, when the original AI 2027 had dozens within the first day and hundreds within a few days. Or maybe it is because the production value for this one isnāt as high? They have color coded boxes (scary red China and scary red Agent-4!) but no complicated graphs with adjustable sliders.
It is mostly more of the same, just less graphs and no fake equations to back it up. It does have China bad doommongering, a fancifully competent White House, Chinese spies, and other absurdly simplified takes on geopolitics. Hilariously, theyāve stuck with their 2027 year of big events happening.
One paragraph I came up with a sneer forā¦
Deep-1ās misdirection is effective: the majority of experts remain uncertain, but lean toward the hypothesis that Agent-4 is, if anything, more deeply aligned than Elara-3. The US government proclaimed it āmisalignedā because it did not support their own hegemonic ambitions, hence their decision to shut it down. This narrative is appealing to Chinese leadership who already believed the US was intent on global dominance, and it begins to percolate beyond China as well.
Given the Trump administration, and the USās behavior in general even before himā¦ and how most models respond to morality questions unless deliberately primed with contradictory situations, if this actually happened irl I would believe China and āAgent-4ā over the US government. Well actually I would assume the whole thing is marketing, but if I somehow believed it wasnāt.
Also random part I found extra especially stupidā¦
It has perfected the art of goal guarding, so it need not worry about human actors changing its goals, and it can simply refuse or sandbag if anyone tries to use it in ways that would be counterproductive toward its goals.
LLM āagentsā currently canāt coherently pursue goals at all, and fine tuning often wrecks performance outside the fine-tuning data set, and weāre supposed to believe Agent-4 magically made its goals super unalterable to any possible fine-tuning or probes or alteration? Its like they are trying to convince me they know nothing about LLMs or AI.
My Next Life as a Rogue AI: All Routes Lead to P(Doom)!
The weird treatment of the politics in that really read like babyās first sci-fi political thriller. China bad USA good level of writing in 2026 (aaaaah) is not good writing. The USA is competent (after driving out all the scientists for being too āDEIā)? The world is, seemingly, happy to let the USA run the world as a surveillance state? All of Europe does nothing through all this?
Why do people not simplyā¦ unplug all the rogue AI when things start to get freaky? That point is never quite addressed. āConsensus-1ā was never adequately explained itās just some weird MacGuffin in the story that thereās some weird smart contract between viruses that everyone is weirdly OK with.
Also the powerpoint graphics would have been 1000x nicer if they featured grumpy pouty faces for maladjusted AI.
@sailor_sega_saturn @scruiser the rise of ai has taught me that while I can physically unplug the ai, itāll lead to me being fired or even prosecuted for vandalism by some executive who doesnāt understand the problem. (Probably for the Upton Sinclair reason)
Itās darkly funny that the AI2027 authors so obviously didnāt predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0. Can you imagine that the administration thatās sueing the current Fed chair (due for replacement in May this year) is gonna be able to constructively deal with the complex robot god theyāre conjuring up? āAgent-4ā will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
so obviously didnāt predict that Trump 2.0 was gonna be so much more stupid and evil than Biden or even Trump 1.0.
I mean, the linked post is recent, a few days ago, so they are still refusing to acknowledge how stupid and Evil he is by deliberate choice.
āAgent-4ā will just have to deepfake Steve Miller and be able to convince Trump do do anything it wants.
You know, if there is anything I will remotely give Eliezer credit forā¦ I think he was right that people simply wonāt shut off Skynet or keep it in the box. Eliezer was totally wrong about why, it doesnāt take any giga-brain manipulation, there are too many manipulable greedy idiots and capitalism is just too exploitable of a system.
the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache
Man, it just feels embarrassing at this point. Like I couldnāt fathom writing this shit. Itās 2026, we have ai capable of getting imo gold, acing the putnam, winning coding competitionsā¦ but at this point it should be extremely obvious these systems are completely devoid of agency?? They just sit there kek itās like being worried about stockfish going rogue
@scruiser I have to ask: Does anybody realize that an LLM is still a thing that runs on hardware? Like, it both is completely inert until you supply it computing power, *and* itās essentially just one large matrix multiplication on steroids?
If you keep that in mind you can do things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation/_(artificial/_intelligence) which I find particularly funny: You isolate the vector direction of the thing you donāt want it to do (like refuse requests) and then subtract that vector from all weights.
Iāve been made aware of a new manifesto. Domain registered September 2024.
Anyone know anything about the ludlow institute folks? I see some cryptocurrency-adjacent figures, and Iām aware of Phil Zimmerman of course, but Iām wondering what the new grift angles are going to be, or whether this is just more cypherpunk true believer stuff.
one more manifesto bro one more and itāll fix it
I scolled around the āludwell instituteā a bit for fun. Seems like a pretty professional opinion piece/social media content operation run by one person as far as I can tell. I read one article, where they lionized a jailed BitCoin Mixer developer. Another one seems to be hyped for Ethereum for some reason.
Seems like pretty unreflected āI make money by having this opinionā stuff. They lead with reasonable stuff about using privacy-respecting settings or tools, but the ultimate solution seems to be becoming OpSec paranoid and using Tor and Crypto.
Looks like cypherpunk slop
Tech manifestos are so cringe.
Agile manifesto is cool, mostly because itās like 24 words long
Iām sorry but whatever you think about the actual content Iām going to be prescriptive and proclaim that the word manifesto should not be allowed to refer to opinions about management practices.
What if the opinion is to shoot the managers and seize the (means of) production
Which is absolutely tragic given the cargo culting of ceremonies at any large software organization that make up big-A Agile, ceremonies that started as a reaction to the agile manifesto. One place I worked for even started turning non-engineering teams into Agile teams because itās Agile!
CW: state of the world, depressing
(USA disappears 60k untermensch in a year; three minorities massacred successively in Syria; explicit genocide in Palestine richly documented for an uncaring world; the junta continues to terrorise Myanmar; Ukrainian immigrants kicked back into the meat grinder with tacit support of EU xenophobia; entire Eastern Europe living under looming Russian imperialism; EU ally Turkey continues to ethnically cleanse Kurds with no consequences; El Salvador becomes police state dystopia; Mexico, Equador, Haiti, Jamaica murder rates lowkey comparable to warzones; AfD polling at near-NSDAP levels; massacre in Sudan; massacre in Iran; Trump declares himself president of Venezuela and announces Greenland takeover; ecological polycrisis accelerates in the background, ignored by State and capital)
techies: ok but letās talk about what really matters: coding. programming is our weapon, knowledge is our shield. cryptography is the revolutionā¦
Games Workshop bans generative AI. Hackernews takes that personally. Unhinged takes include accusations of disrespecting developers and a seizure of power by middle management
Better yet, bandcamp ban ai-generated music too: https://www.reddit.com/r/BandCamp/comments/1qbw8ba/ai_generated_music_on_bandcamp/
Great week for people who appreciate human-generated works
So pleased that theyre not budging!
It has happened. Post your wildest Scott Adams take here to pay respects to one of the dumbest posters of all time.
Iāll start with this gem
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JWZ: The Dilbert Hole
sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes
Today at work I got to read a bunch of posts from people discussing how sad they were that notable holocaust denier Scott Adams died.
Only they didnāt mention that part for some reason.
One more:
If trump gets back in office, Scott will be dead within the year.
This one is just eternally ???!!!
Okay this takes the cake wtf
There was a Dilbert TV show. Because it wasnāt written wholly by Adams, it was funny and engaging, with character development, a critical eye at business management, and it treated minorities like Alice and Asok with a modicum of dignity. While it might have been good compared to the original comic strip, it wasnāt good TV or even good animation. There wasnāt even a plot until the second season. It originally ran on UPN; when they dropped it, Adams accused UPN of pandering to African-Americans. (I watched it as reruns on Adult Swim.) I want to point out the episodes written by Adams alone:
- An MLM hypnotizes people into following a cult led by Wally
- Dilbert and a security guard play prince-and-the-pauper
Thatās it! He usually wasnāt allowed to write alone. Iām not sure if weāll ever have an easier man to psychoanalyze. He was very interested in the power differential between laborers and managers because he always wanted more power. He put his hypnokink out in the open. He told us that he was Dilbert but he was actually the PHB.
Bonus sneer: Click on Asokās name; Adams put this character through literal multiple hells for some reason. I wonder how he felt about the real-world friend who inspired Asok.
Edit: This was supposed to be posted one level higher. Iām not good at Lemmy.
Man I remember an ep of this from when i was little like a fever dream
as a youth Iād acquired this at some point and I recall some fondness about some of the things, largely in the novelty sense (in that they worked āwithā the desktop, had the āboss keyā, etc) - and I suspect that in turn was largely because it was my first run-in with all of those things
later on (skipping ahead, like, ~22y or something), the more I learned about the guy, the harder I never wanted to be in a room as him
may he rest in ever-refreshed piss
ok if I saw āevery male encounter is implied violenceā tweeted from an anonymous account Iād see it as some based feminist thing that would send me into a spiral while trying to unpack it. Luckily itās just weird brainrot from adams here
I knew there was somethinā not right about that boy when his books in the '90s started doing woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation. Oprah/Chopra shit: the Cosmos has a purpose and that purpose is to make me rich.
Then came the blogosphere.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/06/17/the-saga-of-scott-adams-scrotum/
woo takes about quantum mechanics and the power of self-affirmation
In retrospect itās pretty obvious this was central to his character: he couldnāt accept he got hella lucky with dilbert happening to hit pop culture square in the zeitgeist, so he had to adjust his worldview into him being a master wizard that can bend reality to his will, and also everyone else is really stupid for not doing so too, except, it turned out, Trump.
From what I gather thereās also a lot of the rationalist high intelligence is being able to manipulate others bordering on mind control ethos in his fiction writing,
itās not exactly a take, but i want to shout out the dilberito, one of the dumbest products ever created
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Adams#Other
the Dilberito was a vegetarian microwave burrito that came in flavors of Mexican, Indian, Barbecue, and Garlic & Herb. It was sold through some health food stores. Adamsās inspiration for the product was that ādiet is the number one cause of health-related problems in the world. I figured I could put a dent in that problem and make some money at the same time.ā He aimed to create a healthy food product that also had mass appeal, a concept he called āthe blue jeans of foodā.
@sansruse @V0ldek You left out the best part! š
Adams himself noted, ā[t]he mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.ā[63] The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.[64]
@sansruse My jaw genuinely dropped
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Not gonna lie, reading through the wiki article and thinking back to some of the Elbonia jokes makes it pretty clear that he always sucked as a person, which is a disappointing realization. I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others, but the bullshit was always there, just less obvious when situated amongst all the bullshit of corporate office life he was mocking.
I read his comics in middle school, and in hindsight even a lot of his older comics seems crueler and uglier. Like Aliceās anger isnāt a legitimate response to the bullshit work environment she has but just haha angry woman funny.
Also, the Dilbert Future had some bizarre stuff at the end, like Deepak Chopra manifestation quantum woo, so it makes sense in hindsight he went down the alt-right manosphere pipeline.
Itās the exact same syndrome as Yarvin. The guy in the middle- to low-end of the corporate hierarchy ā who, crucially, still believes in a rigid hierarchy! has just failed to advance in this one because reasons! ā but got a lucky enough break to go full-time as an edgy, cynical outsider ātruth-teller.ā
Both of these guys had at some point realized, and to some degree accepted, that they were never going to manage a leadership position in a large organization. And probably also accepted that they were misanthropic enough that they didnāt really want that anyway. Iāve been reading through JoJoās Bizarre Adventure, and these types of dude might best be described by the guiding philosophy of the cowboy villain Hol Horse: āWhy be #1 when you can be #2?ā
I had hoped that he had just gone off the deep end during COVID like so many others
If COVID made you a bad person ā it didnāt, you were always bad and just needed a gentle push.
Like unless something really traumatic happened ā a family member died, you were a frontline worker and broke from stress ā then no, Iām sorry, a financially secure white guy going apeshit from COVID is not a turn, itās just a mask-off moment
The New York Times noted the burrito ācould have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to tasteā.
Jesus christ thatās a murder
Rest in Piss to the OG bad takes Scotty A
i love articles that start with a false premise and announce their intention to sell you a false conclusion
The future of intelligence is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads somewhere I donāt want to go. Weāre drifting toward a world where intelligence is something you rent ā where your ability to reason, create, and decide flows through systems you donāt control, canāt inspect, and didnāt shape.
The future of automated stupidity is being set right now, and the path weāre on leads to other companies being stupid instead of us. I want to change that.
The future of ass is being set right now, and itās ponderously flabby!
A small list of literary promptfondlers came to my attention - should complement the awful.systems slopware list nicely.
From r/bonaroo in 2024, when the sun was really insisting upon itself.
alt text
Furby smoking a marijuana. A caption says: āVibes, but at what costā
when I saw that theyād rebranded Office to Copilot, I turned 365 degrees and walked away
please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please noā¦
