this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
23 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1904 readers
201 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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)

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old

I also appreciate how many of the "transformative" actions are just "did a really good thing... with AI!"

HR reduced time-to-hire by 30%! How? They told Jerry to stop hand-copying each candidate's resume (I sleep). Also we tried out an LLM for... something (Real shit).

Like, these are not examples of how AI adoption can benefit your organization and why being on board is important. They're split between "things you can do to mitigate the flaws in AI" and "things that would be good if your organization could do" and an implication that the two are related.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining

https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068

https://archive.is/cKxyV

David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.

Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.

L. O. L.

[–] rook@awful.systems 12 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (5 children)

Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND

(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)

The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like

Calls Al coding assistants too risky

Has never tested Al-generated code

Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets

Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 13 points 8 hours ago

I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the people who think it's impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 10 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Engineering/Adoptive: Adds eval tests to flag hallucinations

Oh look another one who secretly solved hallucinations.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 10 hours ago

Ah yes show me a senior engineer that writes tests for their intern’s code. So productive. Much ROI

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Fractal sneer!!! I’m spinning out reading this. Every fucking pixel of this is cursed

[–] antifuchs@awful.systems 9 points 11 hours ago

Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like

[–] dovel@awful.systems 6 points 11 hours ago

I wonder where Edsger Dijkstra would fall in this table.

[–] BigMuffin69@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (4 children)
[–] scruiser@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

I've been waiting for this. I wish it had happened sooner, before DOGE could do as much damage it did, but better late than never. Donald Trump isn't going to screw around, and, ironically, DOGE has shown you don't need congressional approval or actual legal authority to screw over people funded by the government, so I am looking forward to Donald screwing over SpaceX or Starlink's government contracts. On the returning end... Elon doesn't have that many ways of properly screwing with Trump, even if he has stockpiled blackmail material I don't think it will be enough to turn MAGA against Trump. Still, I'm somewhat hopeful this will lead to larger infighting between the techbro alt-righters and the Christofascist alt-righters.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

there's no anime avatar, how do we know it's really Elon?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago (3 children)
[–] ShakingMyHead@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Elon's mother was born in Regina.

If Canada became the 51st State, that makes Elon the son of an American born citizen and thus eligible for the Presidency.

If Alberta and Saskatchewan leave Canada (and join the States), this also occurs.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy

[–] rook@awful.systems 7 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I don’t think it’sa stretch to see the independence of spacex classified as a national security risk and have it nationalised (though not called that, because that sounds too socialist) and have associated people such as elon declared traitors. Shouldn’t even be that difficult these days, seeing how he’s trashed his own reputation, and it’ll be good to encourage the other plutocrats to stay in line.

Night of the long knives is in the playbook, after all

[–] cstross@wandering.shop 8 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

@rook @techtakes The real problem would be persuading Gwynne Shotwell to stay on as COO/President in event of nationalization. (I know nothing about her politics but she's the one who got SpaceX the NASA contracts and ramped Falcon 9 up to being the global launch superpower. If she's a personal friend of Elon a takeover that pushes her out could cause chaos.)

[–] rook@awful.systems 8 points 11 hours ago

It isn’t clear that anyone in trump’s government has ever paused to consider than any of their plans might have downsides.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 14 hours ago
[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 12 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Trump has 3.5 years left as President, but I will be around for 40+ years …

Elon Musk thinking he's going to make it to 90 and more is even more delusional than the Mars stuff.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

he's going on an all-psyker diet

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago

This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there's at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

I'm gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek's screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago

Tired: brain rot

Wired: brain soap

[–] rook@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI audio transcription is great.

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987

Sean Murray @NoMansSky

Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.

Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.

[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Kind of a nitpick but there has never been anything other than AI for automated transcription, OCR and speech recognition have been fundamental use cases for neural networks, and dev-kits to deaf kids is honestly kind of an honest mistake well within the known limitations of that technology.

LLM based audio transcription however does get goofy because apparently when it mishears stuff it might compound the error by, you guessed it, making more shit up: Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago
[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Possibly OT, but fits in with the "finance ruins everything" motif we've got going here:

My wife and I have been playing Stardew Valley again, and now the algorithms occasionally find us things like this

[–] e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 day ago

Turning Stardew Valley into Cruelty Squad one mod at a time.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 25 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (5 children)

Please let me commiserate my miserable misery, Awful dot Systems. So the other day I was flirting with this person—leftie, queer, sexy terrorist vibes, just my type—and asked if they had any plans for the weekend, and they said like, "will be stuck in the lab trying to finish a report lol". They are an academic in an area related to biomedicine, I don't want to get more specific than that. Wanting to be there for emotional support I invited them to talk about their research if they wanted to. The person said,

"Oh I am paying for MULTIPLE CHATGPT ACCOUNTS that I'm using to handle the", I swear to Gods I'm not making this up, "MATHLAB CODE, but I keep getting basic errors, like wrong variable names stuff like that, so I have to do a lot of editing and…". Desperate emphases mine.

And at this point I was literally speechless. I was having flashbacks of back in 2016 when it was this huge scandal that 1 in 5 papers in genetics had data errors because they used Microsoft Excel and it would ‘smartly’ mangle tokens like SEPT2 into a date-time cell. The field has since evolved, of course (=they threw in the towel and renamed the gene to SEPTIN2, and similarly for other tokens that Excel gets too smart about). I was having ominous visions of what the entirety body of published scientific data is about to become.

I considered how otherwise cool this person was and whether I should start a gentle argument, but all I could say was "haha yeah, mathlab is hard".

I feel like a complete and utter blowhard saying this, but now that I told you the story I have no other choice but to blurt it out: I am no longer flirting with this person.

[–] YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

A) "Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they'd probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged." -My wife

B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can't believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it's definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God's chosen timeline.

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

I mean you can set a type for a column even back in 2016, I'm sure, and then it won't actually convert. But if you care about that kind of thing chances are you're using R or something, if you're doing genetics on Excel at all you're probably spamming publish-or-perish, and renaming a bunch of genes was, I think, tragically reasonable to prevent against that kind of research further polluting the data pool.

Which is to say, ChatGPT is an opportunistic infection that spread so far because it found a sick body…

[–] alanfleming@mastodon.me.uk 5 points 1 day ago

@YourNetworkIsHaunted Because *they’d* use ChatGPT nowadays then you'd be debugging the same stuff but at one step removed :/

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 7 points 2 days ago

mathrix laboratory

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

Was mathlab where they did the forensics for MathNet?

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 6 points 2 days ago

MATHLAB CODE

Oof ow my heart

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] saucerwizard@awful.systems 5 points 1 day ago

Twitter rumour mill is churning about that guy arrested in connection with the IVF bombing - possible zizian or so it goes.

[–] mirrorwitch@awful.systems 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

I wrote a memoir thing on my brief, dystopic time at Google . I'm not sure if me reminiscing about the time when I sold out fits the topic of the forum, but I think a lot of it qualifies as sneering and might generally interest this audience.

[–] scruiser@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago

It is definitely of interest, it might be worth making it a post on its own. It's a good reminder than even before Google cut the phrase "don't be evil", they were still a megacoporation, just with a slightly nicer veneer.

[–] dovel@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've just finished reading it. Please make it a full post.

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

Did it, and added illustrations besides (to break that humongous wall of text lol). Thanks for your encouragement!

That was great! Thank you for putting in the effort to write it up.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I have written observations on how I see the nonsense crest peaking. Just the other day a collegue remarked that they had been at a conference and it was less AI than last year.

Today, however, I was at an audio / video trade show. I don't usually go to such, but it could be a good opportuinty to update on what is availble, and was close by, it was free and you got a free lunch. There was some interesting stuff in the monters, Yealink had some new stuff for conference rooms. Then just before lunch everyone headed to the key note adress. And it was horrible. It was a CEO who bragged how he had got ahead in life thanks to his "entrepreneurial mindset", though I would more say he bragged about bullshitting his way through life. And then it got worse when he got into AI. He quoted AIs answer on why AI acted in certain ways ("Just ask it!"), he claimed AI would cause at least 5 "penicillin-events" in the next 10 years, raising life spans to 180 and wiping out disease. At this time I just stood up and left, and skipped the free lunch.

It had just been 15 minutes out of an hour, and while he hadn't touched the topics of audio or video, he had established that nothing he would say about that could be trusted, which means it wouldn't matter what he said about their actual products. No great surprise that a bullshit artist likes the bullshit machine, I am a little surprised more people didn't leave, but then again social norms and free lunch.

load more comments
view more: next ›