TechTakes

2025 readers
135 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
listing: all - local
1
20
Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th July 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 4 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
80 comments fedilink
 
 

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.)

2
13
The rise of Whatever (eev.ee)
submitted 3 hours ago by e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
3
55
Microsoft lays off the staff who make the money to fund AI that doesn’t (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 17 hours ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
15 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

4
20
How to pass an AI coding benchmark: train on the questions (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 day ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

5
234
‘AI is no longer optional’ — Microsoft admits AI doesn’t help at work (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 3 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
87 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

6
41
$219 Springer Nature AI textbook was written with a chatbot (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
7 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

7
17
Google Veo 3 fails, week 2: fail harder — Shokunin Studio spins the gacha (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 4 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
10 comments fedilink
 
 

don't just read the text - watch the video, it's the point of the exercise. And I worked all weekend on it. Thank you.

video version

8
112
People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis" (futurism.com)
submitted 5 days ago by irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/techtakes@awful.systems
35 comments fedilink
9
16
Rolling the ladder up behind us - Xe Iaso on the LLM bubble (xeiaso.net)
submitted 6 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
2 comments fedilink
10
14
Pitchbook: AI venture capital resorts to mergers (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 6 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
0 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

11
8
Meta beats Kadrey, AI training was fair use — what this means (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
5 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

12
21
Coding in a material world | deadSimpleTech (deadsimpletech.com)
submitted 1 week ago by nfultz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
3 comments fedilink
 
 

Another response to Ptacek.

13
22
Verizon’s new AI chatbot — customer disservice (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
21 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

14
11
Anthropic AI wins broad fair use for training! — but not on pirated books (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
5 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

15
21
Google's nihilists destroying open web and its own business chasing AI (www.nakedcapitalism.com)
submitted 1 week ago by nfultz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
16
12
Iyo vs. Io — OpenAI and Jony Ive get sued (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
5 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

17
20
Stubsack: Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th June 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
82 comments fedilink
 
 

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.)

18
19
Nvidia gets into money-burning AI startups (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
0 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

19
28
AI solves every river crossing puzzle, we can go home now [content warning: botshit] (gemini.google.com)
submitted 1 week ago by diz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
24 comments fedilink
 
 

I think this summarizes in one conversation what is so fucking irritating about this thing: I am supposed to believe that it wrote that code.

No siree, no RAG, no trickery with training a model to transform the code while maintaining identical expression graph, it just goes from word-salading all over the place on a natural language task, to outputting 100 lines of coherent code.

Although that does suggest a new dunk on computer touchers, of the AI enthusiast kind, you can point at that and say that coding clearly does not require any logical reasoning.

(Also, as usual with AI it is not always that good. sometimes it fucks up the code, too).

20
22
We test Google Veo: impressive demo, unusable results (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
 
 

this took me all day, but it's a banger if i do say so myself - watch the video first

video version

podcast probably tomorrow

21
29
AI venture capital resorts to feeding the secondary market (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
5 comments fedilink
 
 

podcast version
video version

22
115
Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
16 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

23
101
Salesforce: AI agents don’t work — but we’re charging 6% more for AI anyway (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
10 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

24
18
Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose | Defector (defector.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by nfultz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
25
117
Google's Gemini 2.5 pro is out of beta. (awful.systems)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by diz@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
72 comments fedilink
 
 

I love to show that kind of shit to AI boosters. (In case you're wondering, the numbers were chosen randomly and the answer is incorrect).

They go waaa waaa its not a calculator, and then I can point out that it got the leading 6 digits and the last digit correct, which is a lot better than it did on the "softer" parts of the test.

view more: next ›