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)
Posting not for the content but for the stunningly inept AI slop illustrations:
https://datastream.substack.com/p/mistakes-from-my-failed-startup-in
Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922’s Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:
On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.
You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I’d say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.
I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn’t some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.
ffs it’s in public domain just use a still from the staircase silhouette like everyone else
today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/
can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be
that article misses one of the delicious parts of that story: they called saltman a “podcast bro” in derision
looked up the previous thread (now that I’m at laptop briefly)
OpenAI considered building everything in-house and raising capital for an expensive plan to build a network of factories known as “foundries” for chip manufacturing.
Oh man, that’s a delicious understatement. If the allegations are true, this was a plan that would make the military-industrial complex envious.
Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you’re not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you’re shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.
The new self-checkout process is as follows:
- Scan your item
- Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn’t get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
- Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
- Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag “your… Item.” Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
- GOTO 1
Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I’ve found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.
sometimes i manage to confuse self-checkout overhead camera by having a bike helmet on, when that happens i have to hold it up over bagging area (but not put inside because weight won’t match)
I call this the law of conservation of complexity
a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles
…but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.
we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull
mainevery time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty uniquethe pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web
the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic??? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.
this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?
Love it.
manuals.awful.systemsalso, what’s a funny subdomain for this kind of thing?
gibberish.awful.systems, to form GAS
mouthful.awful.systems
scribes.ofdamn
I want that album
Sundar Pichal, Google Q3 2024 earnings call:
We’re also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency. Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster.
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
Secondly, if it isn’t, what version of it is?
Best case scenario they are using a loose definition of AI to mean any code generated by other code in order to signal to investors that google isn’t the hulking, sluggish monolith that it is and is agile enough to use AI.
Worst case scenario: “hey chatgpt pls write me new search algorithm to print money, thanks, sundar”
from someone on Mastodon:
Google has a gigantic code generation culture, because the engineers there strongly prefer complexity to drudgery.
If you asked them to write fizzbuzz and left them in a room for twelve hours they would deliver a new programming language that generalized repetitive string printing, with an extension language for potential non-string-printing actions.
I left in ‘22 but feel fairly confident that “25% of code generated by AI” is going to be more of the same.
that’s quite appealing to me ngl
God knows I like a good DSL, but “complexity over drudgery” just sounds miserable. I also wonder what kind of stuff they’re coding that’s supposedly trivial enough to be generated by AI.
Boss needs you to find the contiguous subarray with the maximum sum. Says he needs it by EOB Friday.
Here ya go boss, a 80% prototype solution.
/* TODO: support other element types */ unsigned int * maxsumsubarr(unsigned int arr[], size_t len, size_t * sublen) { *sublen = len; return arr; }
I half want to jest “PDD strikes again” but honestly it feels like only half the explanation
(promotion driven dev)
Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.
oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit
Firstly, if this is literally true they’re completely fucking cooked.
I totally believe it. Y’all remember Stadia? That was a cosmic freebie and Google absolutely dropped the ball on it so laughably hard.
which part of it was the freebie? whole service looked dead on arrival to me (for the simple reason of physics)
At least for me in the US, performance was very good. I was able to 100% Sekiro, for example.
The reason I think it was a freebie is:
- Everyone was stuck in-doors about six months after launch
- Everybody wanted to play videogames, but no one could get GPUs and the console situation was not great
- Cyberpunk
20222077 came out and tons of people wanted to play it. It ran terribly on consoles and on PCs, but surprisingly well on Stadia at launch
It may have still failed altogether anyway, but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity, and instead stuck by their absolutely confusing-as-fuck “like Netflix but not really; first let me explain how this works” subscription model, always gets me.
Edit: Cyberpunk 2077 🤦🏻♂️
but the fact that they didn’t seize this opportunity
honestly, I think they did try, and ran into the unfortunate reality of physics
to make that product work, you need reliable high throughput (this is helped by codecs), sufficient juggle-able GPU space (this is helped by being a gear-hogging first-in-line monopolist), and lastly the casual little requirement of actually being close enough to your customer base
iirc US cost to coast latency is around 65~70ms (so 2x that is the upper timebound for player interactivity, obvs there it’d be less because more local DCs though). just from me to europe is 165msec+, with a far less predictable path throughput. the scale economics to launch a DC for this in ZA (even to serve subsaharan africa all the way up to kenya) just plain doesn’t work, and there are many more places in the world where it doesn’t
it’ll be interesting to see if a retrospective as to why it failed leaks out of that biz someday
for the love of beebo can i just get like eleventeen seconds pls where i dont have to put up with the sociopathy that is academic cs
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
Ugh, from me as well: sorry to hear that.
I can relate to how you feel about the AI stuff. I also work for GenAI-pilled upper management, and the forced introduction of github copilot is coming soon. It will make us all super extra productive! …they say. Dreading it already. I won’t use it at all, I’ve already made that clear to my superior. But my colleagues might use it, and then I will have to review the AI slop… uggghh…
Maybe a small silver lining to raise the mood here, recent article from Monday: Gartner sounds alarm on AI cost, data challenges
If even freaking Gartner is now saying “well, maybe AI is too expensive and not actually so useful”… then maybe the world of management will wisen up as well, soon, hopefully, maybe?
an idea I just had (which would need some work but talking hypothetical): wouldn’t it be lovely if
IDEsVS Code[0] automatically inserted “Copilot Used Here” start/end markers around all generated shit. could even make it a styleguide/editorconfig so it’s universally set across projects[1][0] - because lol ofc it’s mainly vscode rn
[1] - and then when you find colleagues who lie about whether they’re using it you wrap all their desk shit in foil
I like the idea. Or maybe marking such changes in the commit message… I might try to bring that up when the time comes.
in the current most-typical mode of engagement, commit messages are too disconnected from the actual contents. it requires someone who gives a shit to go looking
conversely, what I mean is something like “a hook that guarantees that the moment the plugin is engaged and output from it is scribed in source, metadata about that event is simultaneously co-written”
it’s already generating a pile of other things, it may as well generate timestamps and callsig and callhash and shit too…
the number one problem with this, of course, is that it’s going to be extremely unpopular with a Vocal Set Of People who rely on this shit to make themselves look good
oof, I’m sorry. it’s so hard to get capitalists to understand the nature of what they’re enabling, especially if it seems to be working in the short term. it’s the most frustrating thing during a bubble — it taints every decision the executive class makes, and enables grifters to get away with obvious shit even over objections from people who know better.
oof :x
what’s the next step on that?
That fucking sucks, esp as you put a lot of time into it.
I’m really sorry. I know how frustrating all of this bullshit is. Here for you. <3
FastCompany: “In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots”
It’s interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need “Apple Intelligence”[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous “Crush” AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday… I find it just alienating.
Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can’t find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don’t think anyone can.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
They’re advertising automated slideshows? In 2024? That’s desperate.
[1] I’d like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it “iSlop”
Its simple, its catchy, and it turns Apple’s own naming scheme against them, I’m fully in support of this.
Brian Merchant put out a “complete guide to luddite horror films”, which focuses on horror films which directly critique tech in one way or another.
On a personal note, I suspect “luddite horror” (alternatively called “techno-horror”) is probably gonna blow up in popularity pretty soon - between boiling resentment against tech in general, and the impending burst of the AI bubble, I suspect audiences are gonna be hungry as hell for that kinda stuff.
Additionally, I suspect AI as a whole (and likely its supporters) will find itself becoming a pop-culture punchline much the same way NFTs/crypto did. Beyond getting pushed into everyone’s faces whether they liked it or not, public embarrassments like Google’s glue pizza debacle and ChatGPT’s fake cases have already given comedians plenty of material to use, whilst the ongoing slop-nami turned “AI” as a term into a pretty scathing pejorative within the context of creative arts.
I was just about to ask after Threads.
I’m just sad Hardware wasn’t mentioned. (Btw, for anybody who needs content warnings, that movie has a big one for the voyeur janitor).
E: prob more of a cyberpunk/sf movie anyway, even if a few people I knew who watched it were horrified
Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]
Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists’ already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists’ goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.
On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin’s drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag’s dominance is inevitable. He’s not the first person I’ve seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he’s almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid’s fueling the tech industry’s relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.
not going to be successful in this new world without using it
The hubris is almost impressive in itself. There’s not a single technology in human history that has managed to kill every art form not using it. Digital art didn’t do it, photography, pencil, movable type printing, nib pens, oil paints, scraffito, probably not even the invention of currency did it. He thinks autoplag of all things will?
i suppose when this guy speaks of artists, he means people making art as their primary source of income. not to say that those people aren’t artists as valid as any others. but he’s saying if you don’t use ai to push out stuff ever faster, you won’t make it. fuck taking your time to get inspired and have it mean something, just give us the soulless garbage to sell our products already.
I somewhat assumed so based on the usual corporate ghoul definition of “successful”. That’s why I included currency as something without which artists have managed to make a living since its invention. That particular example may be arguable, but being a successful artist is not and will not be predicated entirely on how fast one can crank out “content”. How many movies do the wealthiest directors put out per year?
I mean, he is their VP of Autoplag, so I imagine he’s got even more reason to believe than the average MBA. That doesn’t undermine your point, but I think the fact that adobe has appointed a VP of Autoplag should be part of the story to begin with, rather than being assumed. Did they ever have a VP of blockchain? Or a VP of copyright fraud?
the boot just does not understand why the face under it is complaining
in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers
oh dear, how sad, nevermind.
oh no, a bunch of nationalist pricks might stop fucking up our community spaces. I might never have a proud Russian gatekeep my contributions ever again! no please don’t go
and here’s hoping the American nationalist devs contributing on behalf of their military-industrial complex employer (hello Anduril) take a hint from this and also fuck off to their own communities where they can bully each other for no fucking reason
they won’t because the cruelty is the point for fascists regardless of nation, but here’s hoping
you see, they are Bad Guys, but they’re Our Bad Guys™ so they’re there to stay. russian devs were removed because of sanctions, not because of any moral reservations about nationalism
mr president, we must not allow kernel gap
JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.
Oh wait, that’s just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o
google got legally beat down a fair bit in app store area https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/court-orders-google-monopolist-knock-it-monopoly-stuff
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as “Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy”
Vivek “I gave birth to myself” Ramaswamy
Gonna change my name to Goldman Sachs and style myself as my own founder.
he’s a self-made man, apparently
Your family wants to see you post on threads bullshit is laughable
Your family wants to see you
Doubt
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the “created” notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
Oh it was for the KPIs? All is forgiven then. /s
right? if only you knew it was for Sacred Advertising Revenue and Good Statistics, you wouldn’t have embarrassed yourself so in public! alas, the dangers of the modern internet
Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.
I wonder what major world events were happening in the 1930s-1940s that would line up with this…
As it turned out, Meyer did take the side of the Republican party on some issues. He was opposed to FDR’s New Deal, and this was reflected in the Post’s editorial stance as well as its news coverage, especially regarding the National Recovery Administration (NRA). He even wrote an editorializing “news” story under a fake name
THERE IT IS!
But back to Jeff.
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.
Yep. We’re protected from intimidation and extortion so long as we pay our dues to the consiglieri when he comes around and don’t get too chummy with the cops.
more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.
(e: not blaming you, just posting from outside hell)
no escape
Rest of world: is there no alternative to US hegemony?
CIA: *raises head from pile of blow, puts gun on table* no
It’s more like everyone is hungry for content and the POTUS election is a big generator of it.
Also most of us speak a lot of English so it is easier to follow than for example Mandarin.
…and other examples of why there are no alternatives to US hegemony!
Ok actually read the screed. Ahhhh yes good ol’ Jeff “In the years after I bought the WaPo and everyone got suspicious, me and my billions of dollars have done nothing but improve the world and my credibility and definitely didn’t trap anyone in warehouses to die in a tornado, so you all trust me now, right?” Bezos
Broke: Simpsons did it first
Woke: OJ Simpson did it first
