this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2025
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TechTakes

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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.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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

From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:

We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we're forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs... and one in particular.

The average Founder CEO.

Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:

  • They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
  • They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
  • They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they're trying to sell you.
  • They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
  • They contradict themselves, pretending they aren't.
  • They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don't take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
  • They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
  • They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
  • They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
  • They're very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 2 points 2 hours ago

as a thing both parallel and tangent to usual sneerjects, this semafor article is kinda notable

I'll try gather previous dm sneers here later, but some things that stood out:

  • the author writes about groupchats in the most goddamn abstract way possible, as though they're immensely surprised
  • the subject matter acts as hard confirmation/evidence of observed lockstep over the last few years by so many of the worst fucker around
  • the author then later goes "oh yeah but no I've actually done this and been burned by it" so I'm just left thinking "skill issue" (and while I say that curtly, I will readily be among the first people to get extremely vocal about the ways a lot of this tech falls short in purpose sometime)
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

An hackernews responds to the call for "more optimistic science fiction" with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840786

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 45 minutes ago

Astro-Modest Proposal

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 5 points 57 minutes ago

What a piece of shit

Interesting that "disease is hardly a problem anymore" yet homeless people are "typically held back by serious mental illness".

"It's better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal". It's not. It's really not. The wild is nothing but fear, starvation, sickness and death.

Shout out to the guy replying with his idea of using slavery to solve homelessness and drug addiction.

[–] raoul@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

The homeless people i've interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, [...]. They don't have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public.

My goodness, can this guy be more of a condescending asshole?

I don't think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger.

Ok, he can 🤢

Edit: I cannot stop thinking about the 'no rich inner world' part, this is so stupid. So, with the number of homeless people increasing, does that mean:

  • Those people never had a 'rich inner world' but were faking it?
  • In the US your inner thoughs are attached to your job like for health insurance?
  • Or the guy is confusing inner world and interior decoration?

Personally, I go with the last one.

Oh man I used to have all kinds of hopes and dreams before I got laid off. Now I don't even have enough imagination to consider a world where a decline in demand for network engineers doesn't completely determine my will or ability to live.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Also hard to show a rich inner world when you are constantly in trouble financially, possessions wise, mh and personal safety and interacting with someone who could be one of the bad people who doesnt think you are human, or somebody working in a soup kitchen for the photo op/ego boost. (This assumes his interactions go a little bit further than just saying 'no' to somebody asking for money).

So yeah bad to see hn is in the useless eaters stage.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 7 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they're creating. Either they're lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 6 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Maybe It's just CEO dick measuring, so chads Nadella and PIchai can both claim a rock hard 20-30% while virgin Zuckeberg is exposed as not even knowing how to put the condom on.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.

Of course he did.

The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.

So the more permissive at compile time the language the better the AI comes out smelling? What a completely unanticipated twist of fate!

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.

I'm thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago (2 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Blergh. Just fucking fund public transport and don’t use AI. Easy wins on traffic and efficiency.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 5 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

That's what continually kills me about these bastards. There is so much legitimate low-hanging fruit that they don't have the administrative capacity to follow up on even if they did have the interest and rather than actually pursue any of it they want to further cut their ability to do anything in the vain hole that throwing enough money at tech grifters will magically produce a perfect solution.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 47 minutes ago

Yeah. After all, Gavin Newsom was created in a test tube to be the perfect liberal career politician. Find obvious areas of concern by co-opting leftist causes, then use that as an excuse to funnel money into corporations. This is common democrat ghoul shit.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 35 minutes ago

Also, I assume it gets even worse, traffic is I think one of those hard problems, those complex coordination problems which we are not great at solving using tech, if either people are their own free agents like cars, or like cars have a mass (that is why you just can't use tcp/ip like stuff, but trains/public transport and the global goods transportation network works a lot better apart from the last mile sort of stuff). AI is not going to be able to do shit. Hell, this is prob going to be a problem like 'im going to make sex simple' (See also the alt text). Just pure AI magical thinking stuff.

Also, use bicycles you cowards. Death to the cult of car.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 4 points 9 hours ago

~~The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!~~

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Aw man, Natasha Lyonne is going AI. Notably she is partnering with a company, Moonvalley, that claims to have developed an “ethical” model, Marey, trained on “clean” data- i.e. data that is owned or licensed by Moonvalley and whoever else they are partnering with.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago

ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever

i don't expect literally this but there's some potential hidden sleaziness inside

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the "no longer interested in Season 2" pile, but for different reasons.

The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”

So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I'm sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can't see how it's going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

That and also: training and running a model still takes a ton of energy! LLMs will never be ethical.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 14 points 22 hours ago

Update on the University of Zurich's AI experiment: Reddit's considering legal action against the researchers behind it.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (2 children)

In terms of depreciating assets, an AI data center is worse than a boat.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 5 hours ago

In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 7 points 11 hours ago

AI data centers brought some ratty bloggers into their five minutes of fame, while a boat only brought Ziz &co from Alaska to SFBA

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

the shunning is working guys

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 16 points 22 hours ago

"Kicked out of a ... group chat" is a peculiar definition of "offline consequences".

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

"The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post"- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn't get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also 'Blutarsky' and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

he's a centrist econ blogger who's been getting into light race science

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 1 points 34 minutes ago

yeah I tried looking up his writings on the subject but substack was down. Counted that as a win and stopped looking.

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 9 points 14 hours ago

I'm a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I'm also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I'm a moderate.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 16 hours ago

And he is brave enough to say that:

  • There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.

  • Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.

  • Trans people are not people.

Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.

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