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.

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

  • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    29 minutes ago

    I had to use clipchamp for something recently and my god, what an awful, enshittified piece of software. It’s sending me emails now!

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 hours ago

    And, whilst I’m here, a post from someone who tried using copilot to help with software dev for a year.

    I think my favourite bit was

    Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code.

    Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

    https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113690087142854474

    (and also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging for those who haven’t come across it)

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.

    “What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”

    What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.

    https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

  • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    18 hours ago

    ai fan asks chempros about their use of lying boxes: majority opinion is that this shit is useless, leaks confidential information and is a massive legal liability https://www.reddit.com/r/Chempros/comments/1hgxvsj/ai_in_the_workplace_how_have_chemistsscientists/

    top response:

    It’s a good trick to be instantly dismissed. No, really, that’s the latest I had in terms of company policy. If you’re caught using AI for anything, you’re out the door. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen (and a lawsuit we cannot defend against). Gross misconduct, not eligible for rehire, and all that. Same as intentionally misrepresenting data (because it is). (Pharma)

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      8 hours ago

      From the replies:

      In cGMP and cGLP you have to be able to document EVERYTHING. If someone, somewhere messes up the company and authorities theoretically should be able to trace it back to that incident. Generative AI is more-or-less a black box by comparison; plus how often it’s confidently incorrect is well known and well documented. To use it in a pharmaceutical industry would be teetering on gross negligence and asking for trouble.

      Also suppose that you use it in such a way that it helps your company profit immensely and—uh oh! The data it used was the patented IP of a competitor! How would your company legally defend itself? Normally it would use the documentation trail to prove that they were not infringing on the other company’s IP, but you don’t have that here. What if someone gets hurt? Do you really want to make the case that you just gave Chatgpt a list of results and it gave a recommended dosage for your drug? Probably not. When validating SOPs are they going to include listening to Chatgpt in it? If you do, then you need to make sure that OpenAI has their program to the same documentation standards and certifications that you have, and I don’t think they want to tangle with the FDA at the moment.

      There’s just so, SO many things that can go wrong using AI casually in a GMP environment that end with your company getting sued and humiliated.

      And a good sneer:

      With a few years and a couple billion dollars of investment, it’ll be unreliable much faster.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      16 hours ago

      AI could be a viable test for bullshit jobs as described by Graeber. If the disinfotmatron can effectively do your job then doing it well clearly doesn’t matter to anyone.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      the team have a bit of an elon moment

      “Oh shit, which one of them endorsed the German neo-Nazis?”

      Aaron likes a porn post

      “Whew.”

  • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Y’all, with Proton enshittifying (scribe and wallet nonsense), I think I am never going to sign up for another all-in-one service like this. Now I gotta determine what to do about:

    • Proton Mail
    • Proton VPN
    • Proton Drive
    • Proton Calendar

    and I’d be forced to reassess my password manager if hadn’t already been using BitWarden when Proton Pass came out.

    Self-hosting is a non-starter (too lazy to remember a new password for my luggage). Any thoughts? Are other Proton users here jumping ship? Should I just resign myself to using Proton until they eventually force some stupid ass “Chatbot will look at the contents of your Drive and tell you which authorities to surrender yourself to”?

    • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        I have a subscription for Private Internet Access that I was using before subscribing to Proton Mail (which comes with Proton VPN). I figured it was all the same (they all have a slightly skeezy feel to me).

        Then I checked out Mullvad’s website and it’s really quite awesome. Everything about their service has a “we want to make this accessible to everyone” vibe, which I appreciate. I am going to try it out. <3

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I was in the exact same boat til recently, but switching off of Proton was actually surprisingly easy even though I had it tied into a bunch of accounts and infrastructure. I actually ended up saving a lot of money compared with Proton Unlimited, and it’s a relief to not have all my eggs in one basket, especially since stuff like Proton’s no logs policy is effectively worthless, and if you’re a whistleblower or similar you’re expected to use a VPN or Tor to access your mail every time to keep from being arrested… but most likely your VPN (and possibly Tor client) is Proton too if you’re paying for it, with the same worthless no logs policy.

      some quick recommendations:

      Proton Mail

      Proton Calendar

      tuta does both of these. their mail is e2e and fine — it’s jankier than proton but also less resource-intensive. it’s also the only other choice for now :(

      I haven’t used their calendar yet, but from a distance it looks good. I should give it a shot sometime soon.

      Proton VPN

      this depends on what you’re using your VPN for. actual security? fucked if I know. high bandwidth fuckery? airvpn is pretty good and they’ll let you allocate ports.

      Proton Drive

      tuta’s getting this soon apparently. otherwise, I can second Backblaze being very reasonably priced if you don’t mind having to choose and set up your own e2e software.

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        Thanks for the suggestions! VPN is mostly to tell my ISP to fuck off. Tuta sounds cool but I am worried about it enshittifying as well. I am relieved to hear that switching from Proton was easy.

    • Mii@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I use Posteo for mail and calendar now (they’re not encrypted between users like Proton but you can just hook it up to any mail client and PGP your shit) .Mail is IMAPS, calendar is CalDAV, contacts are CardDAV, etc. Depending on where you fall on the security-convenience sliding scale, that might be an option. I’ve decided that I care more about portability and standards than super-thick encryption which made me choose them over Tuta, because Tuta offers no way to access the mail over IMAP whatsoever, not even an optional bridge like Proton, and that was a total dealbreaker for me. Posteo also claim they’re 100% green energy which is a nice bonus.

      For drive I use Filen.io now. They’re relatively new so I can’t make any assumptions about how long they’ll be around but the price is fair and they offer lifetime payments too. Also their Linux client is pretty solid and doesn’t fucking eat my RAM for breakfast. They’re also in the process of adding support for rclone as per a GitHub issue I’m following.

      VPN I pretty much don’t use because I’ve never felt I needed it, so no recommendations there from me.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      also, how are you liking bitwarden?

      I really need to kill off my current password manager and bitwarden’s looking like the least worst of current options (esp. when paired with something like vaultwarden instead of running a fucking nodejs sync server on the internet), but also some of it seems quite stunted[0]

      it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

      [0] - no global hotkeys? the fuck

      • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        2 days ago

        also, how are you liking bitwarden?

        I am happy with it. That they only charge $10 a year for services I don’t even need (I could use a separate 2FA app) and allow you to self-host is a good sign. I plan to eventually set up a workflow in Sway (Wayland tiling WM) with a CLI tool (e.g. https://crates.io/crates/rbw, or the official one), so the interface is not terribly important to me. I would definitely recommend trying a free account to see if it fits into your workflow.

        it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started pondering writing my own, because good god does basically every option out there depress me

        I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX, or giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode. So I am only theoretically up to the task, which is … IDK maybe I should start grifting?

        But for real, I have considered writing my own:

        • VPN client where we don’t have to jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client, or finding out that their client runs like ass in Linux (Proton)
        • Password Manager
        • Config editor, so I don’t have to edit /home/${USERNAME}/.config/sway/config.d/90-fuckyou-this-is-where-we-keep-system-suspend-shit.conf every time I want to change something. “Oh no you gotta edit the Kanshi config for that one.” It’s tedious to remember where various programs look for the config and whatever particular syntax is chosen (isn’t this fucking solved with toml files already?)
        • An Android reminder app that isn’t some stupid Taylorist metric-worshipping bullshit.

        PS: There is Goldwarden which I know absolutely nothing about but looks neat. It does suggest that you could just write your own that is bitwarden compatible.

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          I am in the same boat, except all of the software I’ve ever written has been TeX

          I’m sorry

          giving contrived examples to undergrads to demonstrate why dp[i][j] is a shit table name or why ∞ is better than float('inf') or MAX_INT in pseudocode

          that sound you can hear is my despairing screaming[0]

          VPN client where … jump through the hoops of learning a new shitty client

          (not a pitch, but multiple commercial references) I really liked how simple tunnelbear made this for a lot, and also quite like how slick the wireguard desktop-style handling is (you can see this for example with fly.io’s integration to that). I think there’s long context here, and if you buy me a beer I could rant in detail

          PS: There is Goldwarden

          oh good, it’s in Go, my other code allergy

          shitposting aside, re the password manager thing: @self and I have co-ranted in dms, and about similar gripes.

          so, by way of idea, loose laundry list for foundations/design: modern crypto (jfc why is so much still going “yeah gpg is fine”), crdt sync, a sane fucking language to build everything on, own-devices friendly (in the “you can sync device to device peer-wise” sense, vs the “there’s a remote server broker” sense), and pretty okay™ interfaces for client building/extensibility

          • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
            0·
            2 days ago

            I’m sorry

            me too, also i lied/forgot to mention that my particular PhD situation is so fucked up that i went from pure mathematics to cuda

              • khalid_salad@awful.systemsEnglish
                0·
                2 days ago

                That is a good rule. The GPU programmers seem to think this is good code and that it’s well-documented. I am still pretty out of my depth in this field, but it feels so silly to me. There is this historical bullshit about fortran only allowing 5 characters for a function name, and that (combined with some appeal to domain-specific knowledge) is used to justify stupid, freshman level shit like

                if uplo == 'U':
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for upper triangular matrices
else:  # just assume it's always U or L without checking, god forbid you use something modern like an enum, or even just a boolean
    # manually fill in this part with the version of the algorithm that is for lower triangular matrices

                edit: if memory serves, booleans were first discovered in 2011 by John T. Boole, which is why they don’t show up in fortran

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          alas: my main workstation is (non-slate) macos, and it’s unchangeable for the foreseeable future

          good to know those (already) exist as options, though. if I can find some spoons I’ll try look around and see if there’s maybe something similar I can hack up/agglutinate from what’s around

          Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway

          I haven’t even tried it yet because I’m real “ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh” about even the idea of a js-/ts-based gui client for my password manager. largely because I’ve met too many js/ts devs and I outright don’t trust their competence and processes. so your post is definite motivation for me to eyeball some of the other clients too

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      last time it came up, tuta was the least worst of the mail options. it’s not the same offering as proton’s in-garden encrypted, but nothing is afaik. rest of it is pretty okay (I have some (not all[0]) domains on there)

      the rest of the things I don’t have a direct recommendation in part because [0] and in part because I don’t use computers entirely like how a lot of people do. that said

      storage: backblaze storage pricing is not bad. they might have a desktop app thing? calendar: caldav is a dark art beyond my ken - I haven’t even got that shit playing nice on my own things[3]. fuck knows who does this well. vpn: mullvad[1] (has quite recently had another full assessment published). maybe njalla[2]?

      [0] - I’m one of those crotchety fuckers that still has a whole pile of self-hosted things that have been going 15~20y

      [1] - seems okay and to have their head on straight. haven’t used myself.

      [2] - also haven’t used it myself, comes from some of the folks of the TPB gang

      [3] - admittedly I haven’t tried that hard because I don’t need it much, but it is extremely goddamn annoying to debug from clients

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    2 days ago

    Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/

    (it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)

    TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      It seems like it is a neat addition to a robust verification system, sadly they picked it as a replacement for a verification system. Ah the libertarian desire to build a thing but not be responsible for it.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      this is such a mess, holy shit

      and only on .com? I have some very pointed questions about the maturity of the verification program/design

    • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Oddly parodied before it happened in the tv series community (the dad of the somewhat racist main character. The dad itself is very racist).

      E: I do wonder what Javier Milei looks like if he would dye his hair

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      The British elected a guy who wears a mop on his head. You cannot convince me that is his actual hair.

      I still have occasional intrusive visions of Johnson busting into an unattended supply closet in the Palace of Westminster to steal a fresh mop head, shouting, “BLOODY LABOUR NICKED ME TOUPÉE!”

      • o7___o7@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        He’s really sold the bit, hasn’t he?

        Yet, if you cover up his hair, he easily scans as “generic English aristocrat.”

        • mountainriver@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          1 day ago

          And his actual name, Alexander de Pleffel-Johnson, also scans “generic English aristocrat.”

          Hence the stage personality.

      • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
        0·
        3 days ago

        @istewart @techtakes Spoiler: it’s not his natural hairstyle, he’s been caught deliberately mussing it up before going on camera. Also, his friends and family call him “Alex” (short for Alexander), not “Boris”. It’s all an act.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      mild guess: “golden boys, with the the 30+ years required to look Politically Evolved”? and of course the selection factors involved from even just getting to that point and the stylist/image handling that that involves

      there’s also an element of the system does as designed, and there’s an element of self-reinforcing delivery/production of these ghouls

  • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Brief overlapping thoughts between parenting and AI nonsense, presented without editing.

    The second L in LLM remains the inescapable heart of the problem. Even if you accept that the kind of “thinking” (modeling based on input and prediction of expected next input) that AI does is closely analogous to how people think, anyone who has had a kid should be able to understand the massive volume of information they take in.

    Compare the information density of English text with the available data on the world you get from sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch, proprioception, and however many other senses you want to include. Then consider that language is inherently an imperfect tool used to communicate our perceptions of reality, and doesn’t actually include data on reality itself. The human child is getting a fire hose of unfiltered reality, while the in-training LLM is getting a trickle of what the writers and labellers of their training data perceive and write about. But before we get just feeding a live camera and audio feed, haptic sensors, chemical tests, and whatever else into a machine learning model and seeing if it spits out a person, consider how ambiguous and impractical labelling all that data would be. At the very least I imagine the costs of doing so are actually going to work out to be less efficient than raising an actual human being and training them in the desired tasks.

    Human children are also not immune to “hallucinations” in the form of spurious correlations. I would wager every toddler has at least a couple of attempts at cargo cult behavior or inexplicable fears as they try to reason a way to interact with the world based off of very little actual information about it. This feeds into both versions of the above problem, since the difference between reality and lies about reality cannot be meaningfully discerned from text alone and the limited amount of information being processed means any correction is inevitably going to be slower than explaining to a child that finding a “Happy Birthday” sticker doesn’t immediately make it their (or anyone else’s) birthday.

    Human children are able to get human parents to put up with their nonsense ny taking advantage of being unbearably sweet and adorable. Maybe the abundance of horny chatbots and softcore porn generators is a warped fun house mirror version of the same concept. I will allow you to fill in the joke about Silicon Valley libertarians yourself.

    IDK. Felt thoughtful, might try to organize it on morewrite later.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      4 days ago

      FWIW I just got an email from GitHub announcing that Copilot is now free for my account (a very basic one).

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning

        • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
          0·
          3 days ago

          yep I think so too. as I think I posted here a while back:

          25068   + Oct 12 GitHub          ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon

          and now suddenly it’s Launched Again! but with limits. gotta whet those appetites just a bit more! sales will totes follow soon!

  • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    if you think about it the human mind is really just a kind of naturally arising artificial intelligence #Deep

  • BlueMonday1984@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    In other news, Character.AI has ended up in the news again for allowing school shooter chatbots to flourish on its platform.

    You want my off-the-cuff take, this is definitely gonna fuck c.ai’s image even further, and could potentially leave them wide open to a lawsuit.

    On a wider front, this is likely gonna give AI another black eye, and push us one step further to the utter destruction of AI as a concept I predicted a couple months ago.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    4 days ago

    Rationalist debatelord org Rootclaim, who in early 2024 lost a $100K bet by failing to defend covid lab leak theory against a random ACX commenter, will now debate millionaire covid vaccine truther Steve Kirsch on whether covid vaccines killed more people than they saved, the loser gives up $1M.

    On would assume this to be a slam dunk, but then again one would assume the people who founded an entire organization about establishing ground truths via rationalist debate would actually be good at rationally debating.

    • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      19 hours ago

      I’m guessing these people were JAQing off hard enough that they got kicked out of their local Oxford-style debate org and had to start their own.

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).