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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?
Stephanie Kirchgaessner is the deputy head of investigations for Guardian US, based in Washington DC
Hannah Devlin is the Guardian’s science correspondent, having previously been science editor of the Times. She has a PhD in biomedical imaging from the University of Oxford.
so is it that both these fuckers are ideologically bankrupt, or are they willing complicit ghouls?
Yes
Quick update - Brian Merchant’s list of “luddite horror” films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume “luddite horror” is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we’re gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble’s produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public’s gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, I’d love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and it’s tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant’s likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites’ image.
I suspect Silicon Valley’s godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - “machinery harmful to commonality” may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but “AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents” is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism’s hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley’s public image.
Of those two, technological determinism’s death was probably the more important one - that idea’s demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn’t inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, i’m not so sure
I’d say they did do some damage to tech’s wider image by becoming a pop-culture punchline and a mark of shame rolled into one.
Incidents like Seth Green’s Ape getting kidnapped, the public exploitation of George Floyd’s death and the legendary dumpster fire that was The Red Ape Family, plus the onslaught of dogshit NFT art and the nonstop scams and deception within the NFT/crypto sphere all led NFTs to become widely and rightfully panned, with NFTs getting unflatteringly compared to beanie babies and NFT profile pics getting either right-click saved to mock their supposed “ownership” or blocked on sight, depending on how people generally felt.
It is refreshing to see the general trend of people laughing when promptbros try to paint themselves as the Wright Brothers Reborn, isn’t it?
my point is that these incidents were mostly mentally filed to “crypto” and were not generalized to wider tech industry
Going outside awful’s wheelhouse for a bit:
Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled
You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.
I hated seeing that guy just wanting to live his life dragged into weird net drama and pushed under the bus by his company. And wow look at how collected and reasonable he was compared to anyone else in the story.
All Mr. Paul had to do was shut the hell up for once and the world’d still be talking about his moldy cheese bread instead of about his moldy cheese bread and how he bullies and doxes retail workers.
All Fred Meyer had to do is be like “whoops looks like the product recall procedure at that store was vague recollections, we’ll get a policy in place”.
The sole silver lining of this situation is that Logan’s deplorable behaviour probably scared at least a few shops away from stocking Lunchly - not just because of the risk you end up selling some mold-ridden garbage (most likely to kids), but because you risk Logan starting a harassment campaign against you or your store.
The AI lawsuit’s going to discovery - I expect things are about to heat up massively for the AI industry:
A woman was scheduled to give a talk at an AI conference. The organizers run her photo through an AI image expansion program to get the aspect-ratio right (how did we ever manage to show photos of speakers before AI existed?).
The AI image expansion invents a bra / undershirt which wasn’t visible in the original photo.
This made the rounds last week IIRC. Though, looking at it again I realize I didn’t notice how over-stressed the hallucinated button is. It’s funny in a disgusting way.
I’d like to imagine that Adobe/other AI photo editing people are frantically scrambling to fondle their prompts a little harder to avoid things like this. Infinite whack-a-mole.
I wonder if Adobe has considered cooling their new data centers with liquid nitrogen?
Cold is key to successful turd polishing.
For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:
https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397
Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.
Quite the proof he no longer writes his own tweets. Fun fact seems like they created various freerossdayone cryptocurrency tokens, who are all doing badly (according to my quick google) he has lost the mandate of heaven.
Electric Wizard 🤝Donald Trump
“Legalize Drugs & Murder”Truly, we are blessed to have a candidate willing to represent the freedom to sell anything on a darknet market and hire a hitman to take out your previous partners or detractors or whatever.
Has ESR always been antigay or is the latest ‘gays=pedo” spiel new?
New for him, I’d wager, but I think ESR is treading a well-worn path: i.e. a huge weirdo gets himself in trouble but then finds favor with terrible people, and ultimately suffers from audience capture.
Edit: I was wrong, it’s not new (hat tip to @Soyweiser)
ESR went like this after 9/11
@dgerard @o7___o7 He was weird and creepy before that (see his attempts to make the Jargon File say that everyone in hackerdom was just like him), but yeah, hoo boy. Him and the LGF guy were prominent cheerleaders for Dick Cheney’s wilder fever dreams back in the day. The LGF guy got better, ESR didn’t.
@m @dgerard @o7___o7 @techtakes Back in 2007 I was a guest of honour at Penguicon. ESR was there and we got talking. As of 2007 he was all-in on all the insane “Eurabia” conspiracy theories and islamophobia. If you’d taken his word salad and substituted “jews” for “muslims” Julius Streicher would have hired him as a columnist in a split second. (That’s when I added ESR to my list of “people I will not share a platform with”.)
He was somewhat less cray-cray in 2003.
In the very late 90s - so only a year or two after the Good Friday Agreement - he gave a talk in Dublin. The only part I remember was when he went off on his tangent about access to guns being an essential component of a free society and then stood there wondering why he was suddenly being heckled.
I think that might be new levels of shithead for him. E: it was not new for him http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=26
Bonus content : https://xcancel.com/esrtweet/status/1852466515519341014#m ‘im not a racist, im an empericist’
Racism is insane; it fixates on superficial characteristics like skin color rather than important ones like IQ and time preference.
I’m sorry, “time preference”? Is this piece of shit referring to Colored People’s Time as a scientific concept or am I missing something?
This is such a cursed tweet ughhhhh
racism is insane
…ok…
introducing racism 2
Oh I see
The plot of Seveneves, but worse.
I think that is a reference to the ‘eat 1 cookie now or wait, and get 2 cookies’ childrens thing. Racists refer to it often. (This also means the black eat the 1 cookie kids can’t build empires bla bla bla).
(when I search for the term on youtube, it instantly gave me a video linking it to cultural degeneracy for example. Really annoying you can’t block channels properly. Also the mises institute has a video on it)
Oh cool it’s even worse then!
(This particular study, if there even is a real study, is infuriating because what it’s really measuring is how much you trust a figure of authority to keep their promise. I wonder why black kids would have issues with this!)
Study finds greedy white children would rather have two fictitious cookies than one real one they can eat.
One weird trick explains venture capital!
Poor hungry kids also more likely to want to eat now than later. Big shocks, clearly this must mean the poor are deficient in some genetic way.
referring to Colored People’s Time
to the what now? What cursed horror beyond my comprehension am I going to learn today?
I recommend looking it up. I believe it’s a term that has been reclaimed by Black people. Obama referenced it as CPT (in response to some other event) in his 2016 WHC dinner speech.
I hope at least CPT does not have daylight’s savings
“Black people are late sometimes” but in a racist way instead of a “Repent, Harlequin” kind of way.
White people are late sometimes too…?
It goes back to the old “steppin fetchit” racist charicature of the lazy black man, usually either enslaved or formerly enslaved depending on when we’re talking.
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
almost every person in tech (…) to deal with the fertility crisis
Why would we be listening to “tech” to deal with “the fertility crisis”? Why is “tech” concerned with “fertility”?
Stay in your fucking lane, will ya. How about mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages to address the growing crisis of open-source development? The crisis of newest C++ standards not being implemented in the popular compilers quickly enough? The crisis of Node.JS existing?
Oh, he’s apparently riffing on this https://xcancel.com/nic__carter/status/1851719672456188197
Knowing the context doesn’t really change anything about this tweet though.
Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense. The obvious sneer is to point out that if the alternative is to interact with people like ER here we really shouldn’t be surprised to see a declining birth rate. But I think the more important takeaway that this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious.
Like, there’s plenty of surveys and research into why people are having fewer kids than they used to, and it’s not because toddlers are little hellions more so than in the past. And “generational insolvency” is a pretty big fucking part of the explanation actually, as is empowering families to choose whether or not to have children rather than leaving it entirely up to the vicissitudes of biological processes and horniness. The latter part cuts both ways, in that people who want families are (theoretically; see above re: financial factors) able to take advantage of fertility treatments or IVF or whatever and have kids where they historically would have been unable to do so.
But no, rather than actually engage with any of that or otherwise treat the world like other people have agency they have identified what they believe to be the problem and have decided that the brute application of state power is the solution, so long as that power is being applied to other people. For all that we acknowledge the horrors of fascism, I think the stupidity of these people is also worth acknowledging, if for no other reason than to reinforce why this shit shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Saying they’re dumb and incurious offers almost too much respect. They believe in racial eugenics based on IQ - look at the kind of shit Elon Musk retweets. Scaremongering about fertility is just the way they get to the racial eugenics, while pretending it’s a necessity not a choice.
Edit: and now I see froztbyte said almost the same thing first. Oops
Man, I didn’t even know how to react to this nonsense
same way as other nazis - boop 'em on the nose
I’d be willing to wager a guess that this fragile little flower has never had a “physical altercation” in their life and would walk away with fucking ~ptsd from a single “hey that shit is not okay” boop
this hints at is that these people are dumb and fundamentally incurious
if you’re talking about eigenrowboat, I don’t think I agree. they’re quite curious, but they “just” go in with a particular viewpoint and a desire to “prove their point” in the most prevaricating way possible. it’s no accident that the entire sphere of “how do we make scientific racism and nazism more socially palatable” gravitates around these fuckers. if you’re instead talking about them making these comments in a “see the poor are dumb and useless and thus deserve what they get”, well, see aforementioned shitty opinions
Nah, it’s the Nazis who are dumbasses, not that that makes them less dangerous. They certainly think they’re smart and the want to present themselves as curious, but in reality they reduce knowledge to another political tool. There is no true spirit of inquiry or asking questions, only trying to marshal arguments in favor of their pre-established answer. Intellectual discourse becomes both a source of power to give their preexisting ideology a veneer of legitimacy and also an arena of conflict where they can prove that they’re the biggest bestest boys.
These people possess neither a desire nor a willingness to engage with the world as it actually is. Instead they want the power to impose their vision of what the world should look like (a strict hierarchy with them at the ostensible top) onto reality, and when it inevitably fails because that’s not how any of this works they end up uselessly doubling down and retreating into conspiracies. Next time they’ll have more power and it’ll work, even though it’s the basic underlying shape of Creation that they’re ultimately at war with.
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are “socialism” - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what “polygynous” means, and I “love” this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It’s technichally correct in some parts of the world.
“socialism or barbarism you say? well maybe barbarism has its upsides”
Oh but you see it’s not regressive because it’s polygynous not polygamous. Those women totally want to be forced to have the ubermensch’s children
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there’s people who don’t want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they’re angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
Weird way to say he doesn’t talk to many women
eigen “Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee” robot
why do we want people who can’t deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
Status. Also just a bit of kink and ‘proving’ heterosexuality (I wish I was joking).
I’ve gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
eigen “I’ll call it ironic if people call me on my shit” robot
—What kind of gambling do you usually have here?
—Oh, we got both kinds. We got day trading and betting.
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said… this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
I feel like Ed is underselling the degree to which this is just how businesses work now. The emphasis on growth mindset is particularly gross because of how it sells the CEOs book, but it’s not unique in trying to find a feel-good vibes-based way to evaluate performance rather than relying on strict metrics that give management less power over their direct reports.
Of course he’s also written at length about the overall problem that this feeds into (organizations run by people with no idea how to make the business do what it does but who can make the number go up for shareholders) but the most unique part of this is the AI integration, which is legitimately horrifying and I feel like the debunk of growth mindset takes some of the sting away.
Amazon has a similar cult-y thing going on with its ✨leadership principles✨, but this seems worse.
Didn’t corporations used to use landmark and shit like that?
So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads
https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices
cobol devs in shambles
I don’t think it’s exclusively due to rust but it’s a very cool change
can only imagine how much wailing and consternation it must be causing in some areas
the C reactionaries[*] I know definitely aren’t ok, but that’s not a new condition. the cognitive load of never, ever writing bugs takes its toll, you know?
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here: your average C dev probably isn’t a C reactionary, but the type of fuckhead who uses C to gatekeep systems development definitely is
You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that it’s easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.
You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it’s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldn’t be use for new software development.
I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it’s very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!
We are not the same.
Yeah that’s the property of C that ensures it will never go away. If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it. There’s all sorts of rationalizations going on - it’s portable, it’s performant, it’s what the computer is really like - to justify basically driving a fast car without a seatbelt for the sheer thrill of it.
If you keep telling young men (which most programmers starting out are) that this language is so dangerous, so scary, of course they’ll start using it
I always suspected that I wasn’t a REAL MAN™, but I didn’t know that me learning programming through C++ and being like “well this shit sucks, what the fuck, there has to be a better way” was one of the first symptoms.
Past a certain point it’s a little bit like learning to type on a typewriter. On one hand it forces you to think about certain types of mistakes and forces you to avoid making errors. On the other hand it gives you a whole bunch of trained habits that are either useless or actively harmful once you’re working with better tools.
Now to be fair, C really is quite close to what the machine is really like, if by C you mean B and by machine you mean PDP-7.
It’s also highly portable in the sense that all twenty or thirty well-formed, standard-compliant and nontrivial C programs ever written can be compiled to a mind-bogglingly huge variety of hardware and OS targets and even work correctly on some of them.
[*] and I feel like I have to specify here
and like all C things, the specificities of pointer mechanics might mean any one of a number of things and they’re all correct
The original statement was clearly meant to dereference a pointer to an object of type “reactionary,” but I expected it to return maybe a Yarvin or at least a Catturd
the thrill of UB: you try to dereference a C reactionary but get a lambda calculus neoreactionary instead
I don’t think it’s exclusively due to rust
to be fair, I don’t know any other languages concerned with safety other than rust, so it was my only option for joke construction.
the US DoD used to push for Ada adoption, with mixed success outside of where its use was mandated, due to Ada’s… well, look at it
Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.
PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I’m bricking it.
I know a bit about qgis + wfs (and surroundings)? enough to be dangerous tho
I don’t know what these acronyms mean 🫡
I’m just going to have to send an email in and be like hi I’m out of my depth. Can I still pass this class if I fail this assignment
Update: I got an extension 😇
I know it’s Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱
As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔
The big difference is that Yud is unrigorous while Wolfram is a plagiarist. Or maybe putting it another way, Yud can’t write proofs and Wolfram can’t write bibliographies.
It’s always the child prodigies
I could go over Wolfram’s discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who’ve had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.
Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.
Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.
As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it’s F9 on firefox.
I knew Wolfram was a massive asshole, but I didn’t know or forgot that Mathematica was based on appropriated publicly-owned work:
In the mid-1980s, Wolfram had a position at the University of Illinois-Urbana’s Beckman Institute for complex systems. While there, he and collaborators developed the program Mathematica, a system for doing mathematics, particularly algebraic transformations and finding exact-form solutions, similar to a number of other products (Maple, Matlab, Macsyma, etc.), which began to appear around the same time. Mathematica was good at finding exact solutions, and also pretty good at graphics. Wolfram quit Illinois, took the program private, and entered into complicated lawsuits with both his former employee and his co-authors (all since settled).
and on that note, Symbolics did effectively the same thing with Macsyma (and a ton of other public software on top of that, all to drive sales of their proprietary Lisp machines), but a modernized direct descendent of the last publicly-owned version of Macsyma named Maxima is available and should run wherever Common Lisp does. it’s a pretty good replacement for a lot of what Mathematica does, and the underlying language is a lot less batshit too
on a side note, I notice this passage in the review:
Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results. Now, the word “discovery” here is legitimate, but only in a special sense. When I took pre-calculus in high school, I came up with a method for solving systems of linear equations, independent of my textbook and my teacher: I discovered it. My teacher, more patient than I would be with adolescent arrogance, gently informed me that it was a standard technique, in any book on linear algebra, called “reduction to Jordan normal form”, after the man who discovered it in the 1800s. Wolfram discovered simple rules producing complexity in just the same way that I discovered Jordan normal form.
this is certainly mistaken. I think the author or teacher must have meant RREF or something to that effect, not Jordan normal form
Gauss–Jordan elimination, maybe?
yah there we go. gauss-jordan to reduce to rref
The fractal border between reality and bullshit, in a nutshell.
Wolfram refers incessantly to his “discovery” that simple rules can produce complex results.
I mean yud is only really a guru on his own farts
classic warning case of someone getting high on their own supply
