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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dgerard@awful.systems
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 3 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
67 comments fedilink
 
 

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. Also, happy Pride :3)

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Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google (wordsmith.social)
submitted 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) by mirrorwitch@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
2 comments fedilink
 
 

Memoirs of the almost a year I lasted at Google. The name of that year? 2008. Yeah. Topics include: Third World, precariat, tech elitism, queerness, surveillance, capitalism.

Y'all encouraged me to submit this as a full post, and I clearly overcommited to this blog so I hope TechTakes fits for it lol

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Washington Post goes AI to clean up amateur right-wing op-eds (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 9 hours ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Let’s put more AI slop into advertising! (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 day ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

5
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Fighting the AI scraper bots at Pivot to AI and RationalWiki (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
6 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

that s3kr1t method: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/05/user-agent-blocking/#comment-259266

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ChatGPT o3 found a Linux Kernel vulnerability. "The future" has an 8% success rate, and a 28% chance of false positives. (sean.heelan.io)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/techtakes@awful.systems
10 comments fedilink
 
 

This blog post has been reported on and distorted by a lot of tech news sites using it to wax delusional about AI's future role in vulnerability detection.

But they all gloss over the critical bit: in fairly ideal circumstances where the AI was being directed to the vuln, it had only an 8% success rate, and a whopping 28% false positive rate!

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Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 4 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
16 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Business Insider layoffs as traffic drops — but publisher Axel Springer says AI will fix it! (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 3 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
0 comments fedilink
 
 

video, podcast

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1970s AI bros (incl McCarthy) whining about the inventor of ELIZA telling them to gfy (dl.acm.org)
submitted 5 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
19 comments fedilink
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The UK will totally replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots, says the chatbot (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 6 days ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
50 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Google takes AI propaganda to the movies (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
15 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Telstra embraces AI — with Accenture (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Firing people for AI: not going so well (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
16 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 1 week ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
125 comments fedilink
 
 

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.)

16
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AI resorts to robot blackmail! — because Anthropic asked for a story of robot blackmail (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
6 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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AI coding bot allows prompt injection with a pull request (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
3 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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AI power and water use is through the roof, and 80–90% is each query (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
4 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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Google: “after billions of dollars spent, we found a brilliant and innovative way to monetize AI! You’ll never guess what it is!!!” (techcrunch.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
14 comments fedilink
 
 

Take that, Saltman! Bet you never thought it was possible!

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ChatGPT guessed this guys Dad's name. (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 week ago by Irelephant@lemm.ee to c/techtakes@awful.systems
11 comments fedilink
 
 

TranscriptA news.ycombinator.com screenshot. It has two comments. The first reads: "I told ChatGPT my mom's name the day my account got persistent memory, last april. I also told it to figure out my dad's name. Once a month or so I would ask it my mom and dad's name. By november it had figured out my dad's name. https://x.com/kenwarner/status/1859637611595214888" It has a reply saying "Unfortunately I feel like the fact that your dad's name is the same as yours somewhat diminishes that accomplishment.".

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You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ data (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 1 week ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
57 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy Instead (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
7 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

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eating our own dogshit (old.reddit.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
36 comments fedilink
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GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
25 comments fedilink
 
 

Video version

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Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by o7___o7@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
9 comments fedilink
 
 

This is peak laziness. It seems that the reading list's author used autoplag to extrude the entire 60 page supplemental insert. The author also super-promises this has never happened before.

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