this post was submitted on 21 Sep 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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[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

nice to see the blinders coming off more widely:

For instance, as Electrek reminds us, in 2016, Elon Musk made a promise. He promised that, by the end of 2017, a Tesla would be able to drive itself from coast to coast. We’re talking Los Angeles to New York, with no human intervention.

That was bulls**t. Listen to any tech CEO nowadays and you will hear nothing but an endless stream of wild proclamations about how so-and-so massive shift will occur within the next 10 years! Five years! One year! Next week!

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sadly no. Though thank you for making my life immeasurably worse by sharing that.

[–] veganes_hack@feddit.org 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

personal vent: at my job yesterday i had to come up with a few fake book titles/author combinations for a project. a fun little task and opportunity to hide some cheeky easter eggs. so, i came up with a few and then asked my coworkers to share in the fun. one of them though just couldn't come up with anything at all, and eventually just resorted to "asking chat gpt".

mind you, i work a creative job, and so do my coworkers. this is a minor thing i guess, but it just made me very sad. how could you just outsource your creative joy to some mindless word salad machine?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Man, knowing nothing else about your coworker, they sound like a completely joyless person. Coming up with fake titles for things is like, such a high fun-to-effort ratio. “Creativity and the essence of Human Experience” by Chat GPT. Boom, there’s one. “Cooking With Olive Oil” by Sam Altman. “IQ184” by Harukiezer Murakowsky. This is so fun and easy that it’s basically hack outside of situations where it is solicited.

[–] veganes_hack@feddit.org 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

not joyless at all. i suspect they're creatively worn out. if you make a job out of your hobby, etc etc. combine that with habitual chatbot use and there you go. it's overall just grim honestly. i'll change vocation though if i'm ever forced to partake in the slop at work, thankfully so far that hasn't happened yet.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

Ah, gotcha. fwiw I wasn’t saying that to say “joyless people are bad”; burnout also tends to look like joylessness.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is NP P or is NP not P, thats the question, by Scott Scottersons-Scottsson

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

Quantum Computing Since Diogenes by Karl Snarx

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[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

God, we had so much fun doing this at my uni when creating an example DB table for an exam (only it was fake song/band combinations). Are you sure your coworker isn't a robot themselves?

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)
[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

“We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life”

This quote is just... something.

Is the plan to literally create 8 billion podcasts in the near future? This company doesn't think that might be a tad excessive?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Tech take from the near future: Podcast life begins at conception i.e. the instant one thinks the inside thoughts should be outside

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 6 days ago

black mirror enhancement: because the algorithms involved may present multiple likely fits to any given input, each output is also considered a conception and given due protection (even if not used)

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

new extreme strain of catholicism: life begins at conceptualization

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Uh I think we are very quickly and dangerously approaching Dawkinsian Meme Theory

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (3 children)

A full timeline on the RubyGems takeover has been put together - looks like the entire situation's been caused by pressure from Shopify.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Who's left to do actual work? Who would start a new project that depends on these institutions? Does ruby just die now?

Also:

When the Advanced Custom Fields plugin was stolen by WordPress, DHH said “This is totally crazy. Like if the operators of rubygems dot org just decided to expropriate the official Rails gems, hand over control to a new team, and lock the core team out of it. We’re in uncharted and dangerous territory for open source now. What a sad sight."

lol

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago

Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

[...] Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 15 points 1 week ago

They put 'environmental impact of AI' on the front of the student newspaper (below the fold, but still), then you flip and see this

kinda feeling two steps forward, three steps back rn on top of all the other drama on campus

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (8 children)

This scream into the void has been on my mind for a while: Apparently I work for an AI company now.

Kinda.

When I had the interviews with my now-employer at the beginning of the year, they were an open-source cybersecurity startup. Everything sounded great, we got along, signed the contract. I took a long vacation before starting the position, and when I got back, I was... amused? bewildered? to find that a), we are no longer open source; and b), we have pivoted, hard, towards AI.

Luckily, I still get to work 100% of the time on the core (cybersecurity) product (which is actually a really good and useful thing, sorry, not going to be more specific), it's just that part of the dev team, as well as all of marketing and sales, now work on building and selling an AI product built on top of that.

At least it's not a wrapper around ChatGPT, and does offer something kinda new and actually beneficial, but still, it's an LLM product.

Now, for the actual scream-into-the-void: Once a month, in a company-wide meeting, I have to observe how people praise LLMs to the the moon, attribute nonsense or downright bugs to something akin to proto-sentience, and give absurd estimates of profitability based on the idea that AI will totally be used everywhere and by everyone, very soon now, you'll see. What finally prompted (pun intended) me to post this is the CEO yesterday unironically referencing AI 2027's "predictions".

Can't wait for the bubble to burst. I'm really curious to see if I'll keep my job through that. At the end of the day, the stuff I work on luckily has nothing to do with AI, and basically every other application of the product makes more sense; but now the entire company has shifted gears towards AI...

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

crikey. I assume the CV is in good order and kept updated on the job sites just to see what comes in.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Yeah... (Un)fortunately, everything not AI-related is pretty great in regards to the company, so I've decided to stick with it and hopefully still be there after the bubble bursts, unless they try to reassign me to the AI-project, then I'm gone.

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Cloudflare sponsors Ladybird and Omarchy, techfash workfare

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

TIL about Omarchy.

Of course it uses Hyprland. Of course the demo video on the website shows using Grok in it.

Still can't believe that choosing a Linux distribution now involves decision-making factors like "what's their take on fascism". But I guess the real problem is that such questions weren't asked for way too long before.

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[–] BasiqueEvangelist@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

why the hell are they sponsoring omarchy
how is a customized hyprland config "helping the open web"

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[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago (13 children)

Damn, I was kinda hoping the Ladybird guy wouldn't turn out awful but nah, can't have shit in IT.

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[–] nfultz@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

They banned the guy that wrote the theil antichrist notes.

https://sfstandard.com/2025/09/23/spilled-peter-thiel-s-antichrist-secrets-now-s-banned-lectures/

Stephens and Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. Kulkarni declined to answer questions about the lectures, citing the off-the-record policy.

legal threats?

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

it would be very funny if Rocco Basilico’s legacy was that his name bore resemblance to Roko Basilisk and nothing else

image descQuote tweet: “my name is rokos basilisk and i’m making artificial intelligence that you put on your body”

Quoted tweet: an embedded article platforming Meta’s Chief Wearables Officer named “Rocco Basilico”

My name is Rocco Pa'perclip Basilico Yudkowski Way...

[–] nfultz@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Just got back from the Ted Chiang talk at the law school, talk was good but all the Q&A was lawyers ask-telling about LLMs. Not a single question for him about his fiction. :(

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

Bethany Brookshire:

Some people think ChatGPT has a place writing things like news briefs, stuff written to a specific style and tone and, y'know, kinda boring.

So Science did a study.

ChatGPT failed.

Why? It got stuff wrong. "Also, extensive editing for hyperbole was needed." https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/can-chatgpt-help-science-writers

[–] bigfondue@lemmy.world 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The Nerd Reich has a post with criticisms of Thiel's Antichrist lectures, including some from European Catholic theologians.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

Starting this Stubsack off with Brian Merchant's newest article: The Luddite Renaissance is in full swing

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Cloudflare seems to be trying to make a shitcoin https://netdollar.cloudflare.com/

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[–] CinnasVerses@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago (5 children)

From RationalWiki: Yud claims that the only women he gave orgasms for completing math homework was his future wife. If he ever denied dating / playing with people from his foundation or making people who wanted to play with him fill out an IQ test I can't find it.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Any mention of my name is now often met by a claim that I keep a harem of young submissive female mathematicians who submit to me and solve math problems for me, and that I call them my "math pets".

I see he did the whole 'making an accusation sound more silly to undermine it' thing here, nobody said things about a whole harem of mathematicians, who just solve math problems. Nice steelman. I expect nothing less of somebody who was the subject of seven broadway plays.

(Amazing he basically admits the story is true after that, but continues to debunk the strawman).

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