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.)
so it looks like openai has bought a promptfondler IDE
some of the coverage is … something:
Windsurf brings unique strengths to the table, including a seamless UI, faster performance, and a focus on user privacy
(and yes, the “editor” is once again VSCode With Extras)
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don’t work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone’s done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on “correcting” my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
On the (slim) upside, it’s an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it’s more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I’ve had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium… sometimes it’s still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
the shunning is working guys
“The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post”- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
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.
he’s a centrist econ blogger who’s been getting into light race science
And he is brave enough to say that:
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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.
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Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
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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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“Kicked out of a … group chat” is a peculiar definition of “offline consequences”.
Siskind appears to be complaining about leopards gently nibbling on his face on main this week, the gist being that tariff-man is definitely the far-rights fault and it would surely be most unfair to heap any blame on CEO worshiping reactionary libertarians who think wokeness is on par with war crimes while being super weird with women and suspicious of scientific orthodoxy (unless it’s racist), and who also comprise the bulk of his readership.
On a related note, they (right wing govs i mean) are now quoting Singal to go after trans people. So ‘good’ times for the polite ‘centist/grey/gray’ debate bros with ‘concerns’.
But like the rightwinger influencers who go ‘wow a lot of people in this space are grifters’ I expect none of them to change their mind and admit they fucked up, and apologize. (And I mean properly apologize here, aka changing, attempting to fix harms, and even naming names).
The slatestarcodex is discussing the unethical research performed on changemyview. Of course, the most upvoted take is that they don’t see the harm or why it should be deemed unethical. Lots of upvoted complaints about IRBs and such. It’s pretty gross.
so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
it’s just so fucking frustrating
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. It’s not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
I’ve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
after I’ve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have “chat to a buddy” as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the “buddy” is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions “MemBot - powered by AI” at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that’s a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Can’t avoid slop reading translated books, can’t learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It’s the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: that’s a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using what’s called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customer’s TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customer’s TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasn’t even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no one’s surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators they’d had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
I’ve logged a support ticket.
Marc Andreessen claims his own job’s the only one that can’t be replaced by a small shell script.
“A lot of it is psychological analysis, like, ‘Who are these people?’ ‘How do they react under pressure?’ ‘How do you keep them from falling apart?’ ‘How do you keep them from going crazy?’ ‘How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’ You know, you end up being a psychologist half the time.”
How do you keep from going crazy yourself?’
When you start writing manifestos it is prob time to quit.
Hope he remembers this in case some day he is in a nursing home, where all staff has been replaced with Tesla Optimus robots powered by “AI”.
Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/
Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.
Pretty sure they’re already doing that for many things.
Also not that this ‘key was generated by a person once’ stuff does not validate personhood, it just means an identifiable person was involved once. So, it can be used to blame somebody, not prove personhood
First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn’t some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they’re supposed to do: rewarding the best.
Lots of credit given to 👼🎺 Free Market Capitalism 👼🎺, zero credit given to open web standards, open source contributions, or the fact that the codebase has a lineage going back to 1997 KDE code.
I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.
If markets really rewarded the best, they would have rewarded Opera way more. (By which I mean the original Opera, up to version 12, and not the terrible chromium-based thing that has its name slapped on it today. Do not use that one, it’s bad.)
Much more important for Chrome’s success than “being the best” (when has that ever been important in the tech industry?), was Google’s massive marketing campaign. Heck, back when Chrome was new, they even had large billboard ads for it around here, i.e. physical billboards in the real world. And “here” is a medium-sized city in Europe, not Silicon Valley or anything… I never saw any other web browser being advertised on freaking billboards.
I think you were trying to reply to this comment
Indeed.
“markets should reward the best” is quite something
Another great piece from Brian Merchant. I’ve been job seeking on network engineering and IT support and had naively assumed that companies would consider the stakes of screwing up infrastructure too high to take risks with the bullshit machine, but it definitely looks like the trend he described of hiring less actual humans is at play here, even as the actual IT infrastructure gets bigger and more complex from people integrating this shit.
looks like a billionaire group chat collective delusion, see also return-to-office
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason, taking aim at AI coders and vibe coders alike:
Laughing at “AI” boosters worrying “vibe coding” is becoming synonymous with “AI coding”. Tech is vibes througout[sic]. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it’s a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse
Code that does what the end user wants is already the exception. Software is managed on vibes throughout. Anybody who goes huffy because the field OVERWHELMINGLY responds to “vibe coding is using AI to create code that you don’t care about” with “so all coding, gotcha!” has not been paying attention
“Vibe coding is all AI coding” feels true to most because not caring about what happens after it’s pushed to the final victim is already the norm. The only change from adopting “AI” is they now have the freedom to no longer care about what happens BEFORE as well.
“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”
True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”
The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care
Giving a personal sidenote, I expect “vibe coding” will stick around as a pejorative after the AI bubble bursts - “AI” has already become synonymous with “zero-effort, low-quality garbage” in the public eye, so re-using “vibe code” to mean “crapping out garbage” isn’t gonna be a difficult task, linguistically speaking.
I’m just going to pretend that vibe coders mean a new VI variant and are using that to code. First VI, then VIM now VIBE? These linux holy wars are getting out of control. (sadly the vibe coder will just go ‘sorry what is leenux?’ and my joke will fall flat.
I agree btw, it will be a big rep damage like how NFTs damaged the idea of cryptocurrencies, and in the same note you saw how a lot of pro-cryptocurrency people disliked NFTs just because they saw this backlash (and the more naked grift of NFTs) coming.
I agree btw, it will be a big rep damage like how NFTs damaged the idea of cryptocurrencies, and in the same note you saw how a lot of pro-cryptocurrency people disliked NFTs just because they saw this backlash (and the more naked grift of NFTs) coming.
That’s for sure. Given the circumstances, I suspect that its gonna damage the overall public image of software development - beyond suggesting software dev to be full of AI bros, the rise of vibe coding has thrown the software industry’s vibes-based management into sharp relief, making its dysfunctions much harder to ignore.
Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you can’t connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
“The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes” is … a take
Gonna copy this in because there’s a lot to unpack, and I don’t want to do it alone.
Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
From: Peter Thiel Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen Subject: RE: Milennials There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now: Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.- Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
- I’m almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Where’s your ideological purity, Thiel? Didn’t know you started reading r/GenZedong.
- Also, it’s Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???
Not gonna lie got a bit jump scared by woke Peter Thiel here. Of course I’m pretty sure his actual solution involves giving young people houses confiscated from those perfidious brown people of one stripe or another. The problem can’t be an inherent injustice in a system that allows for both Peters Thiel and (insert your favorite broke person here) to exist in the same market.
A whole generation is leaning more socialist because homeownership is unattainable and student debt is crushing. The solution is whatever is the latest big tech fad.
Just like all of gen X’s problems would have been solved with more .com, right?
which reminds me, I’ve wanted to post this as a NASB
The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes… someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
Huh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you’re a capital owner.
That Michael Kove guy is one un-self-aware twat. Apparently all millennials work in high paying tech jobs.
I’m a Millenial (even if I think these labels are dumb) and I find these kinds of things fascinating. Esp when they describe things I do not recognize in any way in my peers, re them talking about the causes of people disliking capitalism. Sure I’m in a more progressive/leftwing bubble (of which I’m prob the most extreme nowadays in various ways), but I know a lot of people who are looking into buying houses/have bought houses who still are not fans of musk/tesla etc. Seems like they forget people can have principles, and just look at a simplistic view of ‘material conditions’ (I hope people paid attention to the recent bsky shit on what this actually means in historical context). Flashbacks to r/ssc talking about ‘leftwing polticians not thinking about X’ while the leftwing politicans I knew irl were actively talking about it. Feels very like im looking at an alternative world. (Prob also quite true as im Dutch, and this is about the US (with right wing fan fave Poland having a honorable mention)).
Do think it is amusing Millenials get blamed for everything still. The punching bag generation. Poor Gen Z, for which this is now starting up.
I will never forget a conversation in High School where our resident young conservative sneered about how “sure $Welfare_Program sound nice, but you’ll be paying for it with your taxes” and we all responded with some variant of “I mean, yeah? That’s how that works, isn’t it?”
Image description:
A tweet from ‘Mike’: “Bernie Sanders should be forced to give away 90% of his birthday cake #HappyBirthdayBernie”
These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoever’s trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.
So it’s not quite a sneer, but i could use some help from the collective sneer brainstrust. If you’re willing to indulge me.
I work for one of those horrible places that is mainlining in its own AI koolaid as hard as it can. It has also begun doing layoffs, inspired in part by the “AI can do this now instead!” delusion. Now, I am in no way in love with my job nor the sociopaths I labor for, and it’s clear to me the feeling is mutual, but I am cursed with the affliction of needing to eat and pay for housing. I am also at a significant structural disadvantage in the job market compared to others, which makes things more difficult.
In an executive’s recent discussions with another company’s senior executive, my complicated, unglamorous and hugely underestimated small tech niche was raised as one of the areas they’ve swapped out for AI “with great success”. I happen to know this other company has no dedicated resource for my niche and therefore is unlikely to be verifying their swap actually works, but it will have the superficial appearance of working. I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
Myself and my fellow niche serfs have been asked to put together a list of questions for this other company, and the intent is clearly a thin veil to have us justify our ability to eat. We’ve been highlighted this time, but it’s also clear other areas are receiving similar requests and pressure.
If you were to ask questions of a tech executive from a company which is using AI to pretend to fix a tech niche - but they are likely to believe they are doing so more than superficially and are able to convince other ignorant and gullible executives that they are doing so, what would you ask?
oof, I’m sorry you’re caught in the middle of this crap; it’s not a great feeling to be put into this kind of situation.
take this with a grain of salt because I’m exhausted from a hell workweek, but this felt like a thread you could pull on:
I know they have no dedicated resources because they are actively hiring their first staff member for this niche and said so in a recent job advertisement.
if their AI horseshit is doing so well in your niche, why are they hiring for it? that’s fucking weird, right? use your best judgement, but be as aggressive with your questions as feels appropriate.
also, and I hope this isn’t too obvious: you’re in the middle of a vapid power game between two sociopaths who lie for a living (and the pilfered livings of many other people). craft your questions and statements with that in mind — you’re there to sell the idea that the opposing executive has done something foolish, so come up with responses to the potential bullshit these professional bullshitters might fling at you (“the new hire is just to train/support/monitor the AI” “oh, but wasn’t it already a success? that doesn’t sound very efficient, can you go into more detail?”). one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in similar situations is to stress absolute truth and precision in conversation — and it’s a trap that a lot of tech people fall into, that the executive class tends to use as a mechanism for control. the truth is on our side but these people don’t give a fuck about that, so sell them a story.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I knew this was likely to happen on the sooner side rather than later. I can’t say that the mediocre exit package they’ve given others is entirely unappealing either. Taking it is possibly a bad move in the longer term, but it’s not like I’d have a choice if I end up there.
The fact they’re hiring was one of the threads I was considering pulling, but the questions my colleagues have asked without knowing that context should already reveal some of the obvious issues with that. I’m unsure if there’s strategic value in showing this card up front instead of as a comment on their PR-manufactured response after they lose the ability to reply. I also wonder if revealing the fact I’ve looked at job listings might hurt my standing.
The aggression in my response (sales pitch, as you’ve rightly pointed out) is something I’ve been weighing up too. I have access to all the expensive blanding/branding AI models so it’s more trivial to conceal my resentment at the whole exercise than it used to be, but whether it’s possible to extract anything from them which I can counter is not something in which I have confidence.
I’m so tired of this world.
I also wonder if revealing the fact I’ve looked at job listings might hurt my standing.
If honesty isn’t the best policy you can always work in that while looking into that company you noticed that they have no one in your role and in fact is actually hiring their first. You don’t have to mention where and how you found it, people will probably assumed you used a search engine.
You’re right, I’m getting too cautious. Job listings aren’t unusual to see even when you’re not actively looking. Thanks!
Sorry cant really help, but perhaps showing a case where the llms fuck up in a way only expects caught on might be useful. Just mentioning the lawyers getting fucked over in casual conversation might help. For example heard about a contract negotiations case where the other side used a llm, and it had included a clause that was very unfavourable to them, of course the person telling this story was fine with that clause.
Thanks!
On the contrary, you’ve been very helpful, thankyou. I’ve pushed a legal angle for a while for various niche reasons, with moderate success, but you’ve given me new inspiration for how i might be able to use that here. Sadly it’s nothing that can be as easily understood as a badly generated contractual clause, but that might buy me some time.
From Bluesky, an AI slop account calling itself “OC Maker” (well, that’s kinda ironic) has set up shop, and is mass-following artists with original characters (OCs for short):
Shockingly, the artists on Bluesky, who near-universally jumped ship to avoid Twitter stealing their work to feed the AI, are not happy.
Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don’t want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
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Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.
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The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
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Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
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