Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systemsEnglish
    61·
    1 day ago

    A Christopher DiCarlo (cwdicarlo on LessWrong) got AI doomerism into Macleans magazine in Canada. He seems to have got into AI doomerism in the 1990s but hung out being an academic and kept his manifestos to himself until recently. He claims to have clashed with First Nations creationists back in 2005 when he said “we are all African.” His book is called Building a God: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the Race to Control It.

    There must be many such cases who read the Extropians in the 1990s and 2000s and neither filed them with fiction not turned them into a career.

    • fiat_lux@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 day ago

      I love how they include a “blast radius” summary for each. What a great little website!

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Training your chatbot on the outputs of other chatbots. What could go wrong. (In addition to the nazi ideological bent of grok).

  • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    1 day ago

    TPOT seems to be having a civil war as Eigenrobot is defending the shooting. Somebody also dropped a possible dox on eigenrobot.

    I assume that awful.systems can’t be taken down due to linking to doxes in the same way that r/sneerclub could have.

  • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    well, i’m learning three months late that bitwarden has begun allowing slop into their server code. emailed customer service about my concerns and they replied

    Bitwarden uses AI tooling for development purposes, not within the product itself. No code ever gets placed into the product without a human review, whether that is augmented by AI or a human. All code has and continues to go through multiple layers of review, both human and tool driven.

    gotta find a replacement. keepassxc, the alternative i would have suggested a year ago, is now a slopshop.

    fuck me i am so god damn sick of this shit

    • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I replied basically “I am disappointed, LLMs are bad, what the shit” and got this reply:

      Thank you for your feedback, this is the info Bitwarden can provide.

      With an open source development process, Bitwarden provides the most trusted and transparent approach available. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

      oh your code is open source guess that resolves everything then

      • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
        4·
        21 hours ago

        oh your code is open source guess that resolves everything then

        Yeah, its not like open-source can suffer from catastrophic bugs or anything, that’s purely in Proprietary Land

        (As an aside, Tante did a write-up on Heartbleed back when it hit the news, and pointed to dysfunctional project management and lack of funds as the cause. Considering FOSS projects like Firefox and Bitwarden were hit with the LLM bug, both have definitely gotten worse in the ten years since.)

        • Seminar2250@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          20 hours ago

          promptfondler: would you like a shit sandwhich?
          human: no
          promptfondler: don’t worry, here is the ingredient list, i even included where they were sourced

          • shit (from my butt between my ears)
          • bread (from the store)

          to ensure there are no issues i will prepare the sandwich in public view

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Techbro leaves suspicious package unattended at davos, gets carted off by the police, swiss security folk mock his technical ignorance.

    In the morning, Heyneman was asked to explain his device to a Swiss government technical expert named Chris (he didn’t catch the last name).

    “I give him the same pitch that I gave all the business people in Davos,” Heyneman said. When Chris drilled him on his code, Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.

    https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/22/tech-dude-davos-bomb-lookalike-device/

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      2 days ago

      The device, which Heyneman said does not work

      Wait what xD

      I’m sorry, so what the fuck was this entire charade for, why did you have actual wires and boards if the thing wasn’t even supposed to work. What are you doing man.

      In some sense this is very emblematic of techbro culture - I have a box that is presenting like a tech device and has “code” inside, even though it doesn’t actually do anything I’d like a million dollars.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      He didn’t have time to assemble the prototype before leaving for Switzerland, so he took a Patagonia duffel bag stuffed with motherboards, loose wire, and a box of tools and finished building the device in his Davos hotel room.

      That this is even possible is quite something, that he didn’t even think about how stupid this would look is also amazing, he will go far as a tech ceo.

      “These wires, c4, and plutonium? I need them for my tech prototype”

      Fun detail I once heard, if you take a block of Brunost with you on an airplane, you might get into trouble because the scanners think it is c4.

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      2 days ago

      Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.

      Do not war for centuries

      Remain absolutely savage

      • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        1 day ago

        Oh, that’s easy. His product,

        • doesn’t work
        • isn’t something he understands
        • ✨was done with ai, plz invest ✨
  • nfultz@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    2 days ago

    this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain | Angela Colllier

    And so you might say, Angela, if you know that that’s true, if you know that this is intended to be rage bait, why would you waste your precious time on Earth discussing this article? and why should you, the viewer, waste your own precious time on Earth watching me discuss the article? And like that’s a valid critique of this style of video.

    However, I do think there are two important things that this article does that I think are important to discuss and would love to talk about, but you know, feel free to click away. You’re allowed to do that, of course. So the two important conversations I think this article is like a jumping off point for is number one how generative AI is destructive to academia and education and research and how we shouldn’t use it. And the second conversation this article kind of presents a jumping on point for I feel like is more maybe more relevant to my audience which is that this article is a perfect encapsulation of how consistent daily use of chat boxes destroys your brain.

    more early February fun

    EDIT she said the (derogatory) out loud. ha!

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      1 day ago

      I don’t think we discussed the original article previously. Best sneer comes from Slashdot this time, I think; quoting this comment:

      I’ve been doing research for close to 50 years. I’ve never seen a situation where, if you wipe out 2 years work, it takes anything close to 2 years to recapitulate it. Actually, I don’t even understand how this could happen to a plant scientist. Was all the data in one document? Did ChatGPT kill his plants? Are there no notebooks where the data is recorded?

      They go on to say that Bucher is a bad scientist, which I think is unfair; perhaps he is a spectacular botanist and an average computer user.

  • irelephant [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    I knew that ai scraping was bad, but after hosting a service online for a bit I’m just amazed at how bad it is.

    I blocked the ip ranges: 47.80.0.0/13, 47.74.0.0/15; 47.76.0.0/14 (all owned by alibaba), and now my access log is 90% forbidden by rule, because these bots are so poorly coded that they just ignore 403s.
    Of all the 18522 requests I got today, only 230 were not forbidden.

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        It makes me think that they’re sufficiently poorly designed that it’s treating the reset as a temporary communication issue. I wonder if you could use this to their detriment by configurating the server to silently drop the connection rather than RSTing it. From your server’s side it should look fairly similar, but from their side they actually have to spend the time putting together and sending the HTTP request before getting shut down.

    • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      2 days ago

      I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

      hard to think of anything more dreary and whimsyless than shoving a rainforest into the gas tank of an llm

      • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
        6·
        1 day ago

        Yeah. There’s something altogether disgusting about people looking at the sheer amount of resources and infrastructure that we as a collective society are pouring into this crap and lamenting that not enough people use them as goddamn toys, even though those are also the only people who don’t seem to hate every interaction.

  • BigMuffN69@awful.systemsEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    Without doxxing, my job has a contract with nvidia and my boss said we are doing it to make agi. Can i build a little of a torment nexus as a treat? Ty ans bless

    • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      Just let us know when it gets to Joe Rogan levels of intelligence. That should give us a few months of prep time.