this post was submitted on 22 Jun 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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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

Thomas Claburn writes in The Register:

IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls.

That implies something like 60 percent of agentic AI projects would be retained, which is actually remarkable given that the rate of successful task completion for AI agents, as measured by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and at Salesforce, is only about 30 to 35 percent for multi-step tasks.

[–] aio@awful.systems 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)
[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago

(setq alignment 'good)

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago

Fucking rude to drag lisp into this. How dare they.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The bullshit engine has convinced my dirtbag sib-in-law that they can claim squatter's rights on (and take ownership of) the house that they aren't paying rent to live in.

They've been there a year.

They're gonna be homeless before this is over and I can't get them to see reason. I feel totally helpless, real big Cassandra vibes. LLMs are sooooo unhealthy for assholes.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 8 points 23 hours ago

Id tell them to contact local squatters who have exp in this stuff over trusting LLMs myself. But those people will prob not tell them what they want to hear.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

depends on jurisdiction of course, but where i live you can pull something like this. it takes something like 30 years of living in the same place at minimum tho

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 9 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, its nuts. They'd have to be resident, pay land taxes, and make improvements for 7 years here. They don't even mow the grass, the owner does.

these idiots made me feel sympathy for a landlord. I might never recover.

...

As an aside, it's fun to imagine the similar sort of brain damage a chatbot would cause Fox Mulder.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

It's like when Scott Aaronson got me to sympathize with a cop. A sneersmas miracle.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 5 hours ago

There should be a word for this!

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The folks over at futurism are continuing to do their damnedest to spotlight the ongoing mental health crisis being spurred by chatbot sycophants.

I think the real problem this poses for OpenAI is that in order to address it they basically need to back out of their entire sales pitch. Like, these are basically people who fully believe the hype and it pretty clearly is part of sending them down a very bad road.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 15 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Minor bit of personal news: Newgrounds got hit with a wave of AI slop games recently.

I caught onto it back on Wednesday, but didn't get official confirmation until yesterday, when another user investigated the games and discovered the exact slop-generator used to shit them out - VIDEOGAME.ai.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Thanks for the work you do on Newgrounds! This sentence stuck out to me

No more worrying about lack of content or fickle UGC creators

Oh they're just publically advertising their company to be anti-union. Bold.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago

Thanks for the work you do on Newgrounds!

Appreciate it - keeping one of the last bastions of creativity free of slop is a thankless task.

This sentence stuck out to me

No more worrying about lack of content or fickle UGC creators

Oh they’re just publically advertising their company to be anti-union. Bold.

What is AI if not a tool built to abuse the proletariat?

[–] shapeofquanta@lemmy.vg 7 points 1 day ago (3 children)

VIDEOGAME.ai

Gotta love how the website isn't even functional.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 4 points 18 hours ago

Sure maybe the "Showcase" link doesn't do anything, the "Watch video" link goes to a password protected file, and none of the "Learn More" buttons do anything; but at least they tell you who invested in them as the very first thing on the page!

Also haha I clicked on the blog and this was at the top of the first post:

Here's a Substack post draft that introduces videogame.ai with a compelling and engaging tone suitable for readers interested in games, tech, or the future of creative work:

New use case for AI found: extracting money from venture capital without actually doing any real work.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Gotta love how the website isn’t even functional.

Its probably been vibe coded by the fucks behind the LLM, I'd be shocked if it was genuinely functional.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's fucking abominable. I was originally going to ask why anyone would bother throwing their slop on Newgrounds of all sites, but given the business model here I think we can be pretty confident they were hoping to use it to advertise.

Also, fully general bullshit detection question no.142 applies: if this turnkey game studio works as well as you claim, why are you selling it to me instead of doing it yourself? (Hint: it's because it doesn't actually work)

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

I was originally going to ask why anyone would bother throwing their slop on Newgrounds of all sites, but given the business model here I think we can be pretty confident they were hoping to use it to advertise.

Considering that AI bros are

  1. utterly malicious scumbags who hate anything which doesn't let them, and them alone, make all the money ever

  2. exceedingly stupid and shameless dipshits with a complete inability to recognise or learn from mistakes

I can absolutely see them looking at someplace like NG and thinking "hey, this place which stands for everything we want wiped off the Internet will totally accept our fucking slop".

(Personal sidenote: Part of me says this story would probably make a good Pivot to AI.)

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

and next this one that’ll be making waves too

[–] cornflake@awful.systems 10 points 2 days ago

This Thiel interview clip is amazing

Watch Ross Douthat realize for a moment in real time that he's spent a decade making ideological bedfellows with a techno-futurist, fascist Right that wants to see the birth of a "machine god" & is in no way enthusiastic about the survival of the human race in universal terms.

https://x.com/jasonwblakely/status/1938639600907612610

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

Ed Zitron summarizes his premium post in the better offline subreddit: Why Did Microsoft Invest In OpenAI?

Summary of the summary: they fully expected OpenAI would've gone bust by now and MS would be looting the corpse for all it's worth.

I also feel like while it's absolutely true that the whole "we'll make AGI and get a ton of money" narrative was always bullshit (whether or not anyone relevant believed it) it is also another kind of evil. Like, assuming we could reach a sci-fi vision of AGI just as capable as a human being, the primary business case here is literally selling (or rather, licensing out) digital slaves. Like, if they did believe their own hype and weren't grifting their hearts out then they're a whole different class of monster. From an ethical perspective, the grift narrative lets everyone involved be better people.

[–] UltimateNoob@programming.dev 17 points 3 days ago (4 children)
[–] nightsky@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

I'm in therapy and much better than I used to, but from my past before that, I am unfortunately quite experienced over many years in having existential worries and anxieties about extremely unlikely things.

And then I see this...

Cosmic rescue mission [...] These missions aim to identify and mitigate suffering among hypothetical extraterrestrial life forms

...and damn, that's next-level thinking, even for me.

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago

According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios.

Guys I have found a way to phrase my anxiety in a way where every single word is extremely load-bearing

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 7 points 3 days ago

@UltimateNoob @techtakes This is … actually really neat feedstock for us SF authors, amirite?

[–] istewart@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago

It's like that Star Wars book where Chewbacca got a moon dropped on him

[–] wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

New Yorker put out an article on how AI use is homogenizing thought processes and writing ability.

Our friends on the orange site have clambored over each other to all make very similar counteraguments. Kind of proves the article, no?

I love this one:

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Holy shit. Yes, TV has reduced the strength of accents. But "the death"? Tell me again how little you pay attention to the people you inevitably interact with day to day.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I would also like to understand under what definition ChatGPT can be classified as "connection technology".

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

ChatGPT connects your brain to a quality '50s-era psychiatrist, who can then lobotomise you non-invasively and turn you into a perfect office worker for our billionaire overlords

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago

All connection technology is a force for homogeneity. Television was the death of the regional accent, for example.

Listen to a Geordie for five minutes and say that to me with a straight face. I fucking dare you. (Not you, the orange site member)

Also tell me more about how you don't have a lower-class or nonwhite-coded accent.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Was checking out the QOI image format and the politics of the dev and found that he is pretty comfortable around the ladybird people. (sigh) Also the r slur on twitter.

Really amazing that such a simple format achieves PNG sizes and faster encoding speeds. 1-page specification, though it's more like 2 with a bit bigger text, for bragging rights.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Wait Ladybird is anti-woke? Sigh am I going to have to make my own browser?

(I know I know I'm a lot better about posting about wanting to do cool stuff than actually doing it, hazard of having a full time job)

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I saw that but had completely forgotten about it in the meanwhile because I have the memory of a goldfish.

In the grand scheme of things there are worse controversies, but I would so love an enthusiast browser that is, well, "woke" rather than one having a faint stink of techbro worldview about it.

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago
[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Dominic Szablewski also founded the German image board pr0gramm where he is known under the name cha0s. It's similar to 4chan in many ways. That he enjoys the Ladybird crowd isn't surprising.

[–] flaviat@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago

Woah i had no idea. Apparently he also made a web crypto miner used in hacked sites.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 11 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Another response to Ptacek. "Vibe coding as contempt for materiality" part is particularly good.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/material_girl

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] nfultz@awful.systems 4 points 3 days ago

Sure, done.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Concurring with everyone else that this is a 10/10 read. This article lays out a very reasonable theory that explains why tech maniacs are the way that they are.

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