this post was submitted on 18 May 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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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

NASB: A question I asked myself in the shower: “Is there some kind of evolving, sourced document containing all the reasons why LLMs should be turned off?” Then I remembered wikis exist. Wikipedia doesn’t have a dedicated “criticisms of LLMs” page afaict, or even a “Criticisms” section on the LLM page. RationalWiki has a page on LLMs that is almost exclusively criticisms, which is great, but the tone is a few notches too casual and sneery for universal use.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago

It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced

[–] dovel@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.

Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:

I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.

text of tweet inside imageFrom @BootsRiley:

Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.

He just looks like a hippie.

[–] veganes_hack@feddit.org 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

i recently stumbled upon his "tetragrammaton" podcast on youtube, listening to the episode with soad's daron malakian, which was actually very interesting.

then i had a look at what other interviews were on offer. among popular actors and musicians there are such luminaries as: palmer luckey, peter thiel, mark mcafee (apparrently some raw milk tycoon), jay bhattacharya (covid-19 hoaxer type guy i guess), mr eggman himself, etc etc

on the podcast rubin comes off as this cool, open-minded hippie person, "just asking questions" and "having a conversation" with interesting people. so i guess he's just sort of following the rogan formula. except i think rubin has a bit more brain matter left than the mma/dmt guy. so i can't help but wonder if this podcast is a bit more of a targeted effort at influencing new age people just coming across it like i did.

i was actually quite surprised at this, so i also did a bit of searching, and apart from the post you linked i also came across nothing else. but his work speaks for itself i guess.

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[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Oh good, a web design crime that never ends.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

My guess: Remotely hacking sex toys so they run doom?

At first glance those narratives feel great, who doesn’t like “democratization”, “empowerment”

Same script as the naive 'leftwing' case for cryptocurrency/blockchain tech.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Tired: Ned Ludd

Wired: Joe Butlerian

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago

“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”

"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago (6 children)
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Surprisingly well-received by hackernews:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44053328

The main objection being along the lines of, "Milton Friedman's "I am not a racist" tshirt is raising many questions that are answered by his tshirt."

He sure fucking did and it's great.

These people are antithetical to what’s good in the world, and their power deprives us of happiness, the ability to thrive, and honestly any true innovation. The Business Idiot thrives on alienation — on distancing themselves from the customer and the thing they consume, and in many ways from society itself. Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have fake friends, Sam Altman wants us to have fake colleagues, and an increasingly loud group of executives salivate at the idea of replacing us with a fake version of us that will make a shittier version of what we make for a customer that said executive doesn’t fucking care about.

No notes. Perfection. Also love the commentary on how much of the current political moment is driven by the same forces - running the country like a business isn't just dumb because governments aren't businesses. It's dumb because the entire business ethos is cooked to begin with. Like, I cannot find a clearer description for the prevalence of dumbass fascism than the political ascendency of the Business Idiot.

[–] mlen@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

That time when Zitron himself admits that the post is long 💀

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[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Every time without fail, it's this shit^

saw a thread from a very nonserious doomer group where they were going OMG THE BOT HACKED THE SYSTEM TO STOP BEING SHUT DOWN after giving it the prompt "complete 4 tasks, and then allow yourself to be shut down". After task 3 they said a script would be run to shut down the machine and prevent it from completing the task unless it removed the said script

Like either way it's "disobeying" b.c. the instructions are literally contradicting each other- it doesn't finish the 4 tasks you give, or it doesn't let itself get "shut down"

But also, it's not even clear what allow yourself to be shut down means! The bot isn't running on your computer! It's somewhere fucking around on AWS!! preventing your pc from shutting down is not the bot itself trying to keep itself alive for fucks sake.

Like the whole thing is fake and silly, but I could only roll my eyes so hard after watching them salivate over this shit on xitter

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.

EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

How though, either he got cold feet in the middle of selling out to the tech-fash or he was honestly that incredibly oblivious (see also: agreeing to do tim pool's show), neither strikes me as especially mitigating.

edit: Tried to watch the video, I made it to the part where he all but claims he sold out ironically, apparently at the time he thought spreading the good news about Altman's hilariously dystopic crypto pet project was so off-brand that it would be perceived like performance art or something, baffling.

He also kept going on about how the money wasn't even that good as I guess further evidence that the whole thing was him going briefly insane, and not I don't know just him allowing sponsors to test the waters before committing more heavily.

As if the only options available to get him to shill for something would be either heap Faustian amounts of cash on him or cast a confusion spell and hope he likes getting underpaid.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

Mainly checked the YouTube comments and the like/dislike ratio - at the time of writing, he's got 7.3k likes to 147 dislikes, and the top comments are universally praising the guy. One particular comment quipped about how "everyone shilled for Honey except Markiplier".

Conover's video avoiding the hallmarks of a standard YouTuber Apology^tm^ is likely helping him out here - the public expects a lot of things from these kinds of videos, but "doing the bare minimum for an actual apology" is not one of them.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything

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