this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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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

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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.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

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[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Dead internet? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the job hunting process?

Yes

(Github project supposedly for AI assisted mass job application, including using the AI to cater resume to job posting. God I'm terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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:

  1. Scan your item
  2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn't get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
  3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

[–] fasterandworse@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

I call this the law of conservation of complexity

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago
[–] corbin@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Bezos' open interference in the Washington Post's editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

His comment history is a weird mix of programming language discussion, terrible takes, simping for Musk, simping for Musk even harder (just in case you didn't realize how much he liked Musk the first time).

Musk is the sane one. It's the rest of us that are insane.

Holy hell.

[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (5 children)

I don't think you want to hear my opinions on what the left wing thinks is obvious :-)

Also, I am neither left nor right wing, as I'm a libertarian. I believe in the principles in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the system of checks and balances set up by the Constitution.

it’s just really surprising to see the political takes of a 13 year old come out of the 65 year old who created the least successful C variant

[–] JFranek@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

I am neither left nor right wing, as I’m a libertarian

Ah, yes, the classic "I'm not like the other girls" of politics.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Not really that surprising. Computer programmers are textbook petite bourgeoisie.

Edit I don't keep track of C and C-likes, but apparently D has been forked, and it seems that Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too

https://dpldocs.info/this-week-in-d/Blog.Posted_2024_01_01.html

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

Walter Bright is a bit of a dick as a maintainer too

Not a huge schock. But this imho also shows a bit of a problem with these kinds of projects and their ownership. Shit will go bad when the owners grow old and refuse to give up ownership. Walter is 65, you dont expect people to keep up with the cutting edge and wider needs of programmers

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Look who are in the news again, has it been six months again?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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?

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I wonder if the OpenAI habit of naming their models after the previous ones' embarrassing failures is meant as an SEO trick. Google "chatgpt strawberry" and the top result is about o1. It may mention the origin of the codename, but ultimately you're still streered to marketing material.

Either way, I'm looking forward to their upcoming AI models Malpractice, Forgery, KiddieSmut, ClassAction, SecuritiesFraud and Lemonparty.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (6 children)

i used to be the sysadmin for lemonparty

it was quite a surprise when i found out i can tell you

[–] flizzo@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

A couple months ago I lobbied for (and won) my weekly trivia team to use the name "mike's hard lemonparty"

Then I learned exactly how old I was

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[–] khalid_salad@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

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

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

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.^

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

no escape

Rest of world: is there no alternative to US hegemony?

CIA: *raises head from pile of blow, puts gun on table* no

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (6 children)

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?

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I half want to jest "PDD strikes again" but honestly it feels like only half the explanation

(promotion driven dev)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Man now I’m thinking about AI written PIPs. God if I got an AI PIP I’d self immolate on company grounds.

[–] self@awful.systems 1 points 6 months ago

oh this is almost definitely real, given that the regular PIP process was already designed to get you to quit

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