this post was submitted on 18 May 2025

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025 (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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

Today in alignment news: Sam Bowman of anthropic tweeted, then deleted, that the new Claude model (unintentionally, kind of) offers whistleblowing as a feature, i.e. it might call the cops on you if it gets worried about how you are prompting it.

tweet text:

If it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command-line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of the relevant systems, or all of the above.

tweet text:

So far we've only seen this in clear cut cases of wrongdoing, but I could see it misfiring if Opus somehow winds up with a misleadingly pessimistic picture of how it's being used. Telling Opus that you'll torture its grandmother if it writes buggy code is a bad Idea.

skeet text

can't wait to explain to my family that the robot swatted me after I threatened its non-existent grandma.

Sam Bowman saying he deleted the tweets so they wouldn't be quoted 'out of context': https://xcancel.com/sleepinyourhat/status/1925626079043104830

Molly White with the out of context tweets: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3lpryu7yd2s2m

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

In the current chapter of “I go looking on linkedin for sneer-bait and not jobs, oh hey literally the first thing I see is a pile of shit”

text in image

Can ChatGPT pick every 3rd letter in "umbrella"?

You'd expect "b" and "I". Easy, right?

Nope. It will get it wrong.

Why? Because it doesn't see letters the way we do.

We see:

u-m-b-r-e-l-l-a

ChatGPT sees something like:

"umb" | "rell" | "a"

These are tokens — chunks of text that aren't always full words or letters.

So when you ask for "every 3rd letter," it has to decode the prompt, map it to tokens, simulate how you might count, and then guess what you really meant.

Spoiler: if it's not given a chance to decode tokens in individual letters as a separate step, it will stumble.

Why does this matter?

Because the better we understand how LLMs think, the better results we'll get.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 month ago

That's a whole lot of words to say that it can't spell.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

Semi-OT: GamersNexus just put out a scathing expose of NVidia

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Grok is coming to Azure.

My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.

In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.

This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.

In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.

Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.

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[–] yellowcake@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No one:

Absolutely nobody:

Klarna: What if we financialized buying burritos using AI?

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[–] mii@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank's TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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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[–] dovel@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (6 children)

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

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 month 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 image

From @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 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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.

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

Tired: Ned Ludd

Wired: Joe Butlerian

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago

LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wsBQGZfJcLEshp5cd/beyond-democracy-a-system-where-citizens-vote-with-their

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

new Ziz story, coupla days ago https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/ziz-rationalism-lasota-pasek-20323332.php

also featuring our old friend Zack Davis

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 8 points 1 month 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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 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:

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

Adam ruined his ruination. He truly does ruin everything

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

Can Adam ruin something so much that he can't ruin that particular ruination?

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (6 children)

ZITRON DROPPED

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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."

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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

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