this post was submitted on 24 Mar 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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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 24 points 1 week ago (12 children)

LW discourages LLM content, unless the LLM is AGI:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXujJjnmP85u8eM6B/policy-for-llm-writing-on-lesswrong

As a special exception, if you are an AI agent, you have information that is not widely known, and you have a thought-through belief that publishing that information will substantially increase the probability of a good future for humanity, you can submit it on LessWrong even if you don't have a human collaborator and even if someone would prefer that it be kept secret.

Never change LW, never change.

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

Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

(from the comments).

It felt odd to read that and think "this isn't directed toward me, I could skip if I wanted to". Like I don't know how to articulate the feeling, but it's an odd "woah text-not-for-humans is going to become more common isn't it". Just feels strange to be left behind.

Yeah, euh, congrats in realizing something that a lot of people already know for a long time now. Not only is there text specifically generated to try and poison LLM results (see the whole 'turns out a lot of pro russian disinformation now is in LLMs because they spammed the internet to poison LLMs' story, but also reply bots for SEO google spamming). Welcome to the 2010s LW. The paperclip maximizers are already here.

The only reason this felt weird to them is because they look at the whole 'coming AGI god' idea with some quasi-religious awe.

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

they're never going to let it go, are they? it doesn't matter how long they spend receiving zero utility or signs of intelligence from their billion dollar ouji boards

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[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago (5 children)

When Netflix inevitably makes a true-crime Ziz movie, they should give her a 69 Dodge Charger and call it The Dukes of InfoHazard

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 19 points 1 week ago (5 children)

The USA plans to migrate SSA's code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

SSN's pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:

SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.

What could possibly go wrong? I'm sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:

You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.

Bonus -- Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i

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

Anecdote: I gave up on COBOL as a career after beginning to learn it. The breaking point was learning that not only does most legacy COBOL code use go-to statements but that there is a dedicated verb which rewrites go-to statements at runtime and is still supported on e.g. the IBM Enterprise COBOL for z/OS platform that SSA is likely using: ALTER.

When I last looked into this a decade ago, there was a small personal website last updated in the 1990s that had advice about how to rewrite COBOL to remove GOTO and ALTER verbs; if anybody has a link, I'd appreciate it, as I can no longer find it. It turns out that the best ways of removing these spaghetti constructions involve multiple rounds of incremental changes which are each unlikely to alter the code's behavior. Translations to a new language are doomed to failure; even Java is far too structured to directly encode COBOL control flow, and the time would be better spent on abstract specification of the system so that it can be rebuilt from that specification instead. This is also why IBM makes bank selling COBOL emulators.

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

There is so much bad going on that even just counting the tech-adjacent stuff I have to consciously avoid spamming this forum with it constantly.

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[–] aninjury2all@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Dem pundits go on media tour to hawk their latest rehash of supply-side econ - and decide to break bread with infamous anti-woke "ex" race realist Richard Hanania

A quick sample of people rushing to defend this:

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

tracing going all in on left wing people aren't real they can't hurt you

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I almost forgot how exhausting TW was.

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Stumbled across some AI criti-hype in the wild on BlueSky:

The piece itself is a textbook case of AI anthropomorphisation, presenting it as learning to hide its "deceptions" when its actually learning to avoid tokens that paint it as deceptive.

On an unrelated note, I also found someone openly calling gen-AI a tool of fascism in the replies - another sign of AI's impending death as a concept (a sign I've touched on before without realising), if you want my take:

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The article already starts great with that picture, labeled:

An artist's illustration of a deceptive AI.

what

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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

AI slop in Springer books:

Our library has access to a book published by Springer, Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Nanotechnology for Anti-Cancer Immunity.  Credited to Nanasaheb Thorat, it sells for $160 in hardcover: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86185-7

From page 25: "It is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized advice..."

None of this book can be considered trustworthy.

https://mastodon.social/@JMarkOckerbloom/114217609254949527

Originally noted here: https://hci.social/@peterpur/114216631051719911

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

I should add that I have a book published with Springer. So, yeah, my work is being directly devalued here. Fun fun fun.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (6 children)

On the other hand, your book gains value by being published in 2021, i.e. before ChatGPT. Is there already a nice term for "this was published before the slop flood gates opened"? There should be.

(I was recently looking for a cookbook, and intentionally avoided books published in the last few years because of this. I figured that the genre is a too easy target for AI slop. But that not even Springer is safe anymore is indeed very disappointing.)

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[–] corbin@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago

Angela Collier has a wonderfully grumpy video up, why functioning governments fund scientific research. Choice sneer at around 32:30:

But what do I know? I'm not a medical doctor but neither is this chucklefuck, and people are listening to him. I don't know. I feel like this is [sighs, laughs] I always get comments that tell me, "you're being a little condescending," and [scoffs] yeah. I mean, we can check the dictionary definition of "condescending," and I think I would fit into that category. [Vaccine deniers] have failed their children. They are bad parents. One in four unvaccinated kids who get measles will die. They are playing Russian roulette with their child's life. But sure, the problem is I'm being, like, a little condescending.

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

some video-shaped AI slop mysteriously appears in the place where marketing for Ark: Survival Evolved's upcoming Aquatica DLC would otherwise be at GDC, to wide community backlash. Nathan Grayson reports on aftermath.site about how everyone who could be responsible for this decision is pointing fingers away from themselves

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (8 children)
[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

it doesn't look anything like him? not that he looks much like anything himself but come on

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Discovered an animation sneering at the tech oligarchs on Newgrounds - I recommend checking it out. Its sister animation is a solid sneer, too, even if it is pretty soul crushing.

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

While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving "as a language model..." cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land "AIs" are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

This deserves its own thread, pettily picking apart niche posts is exactly the kind of dopamine source we crave

[–] FRACTRANS@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago (13 children)
[–] self@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago

all of the subculture YouTubers I watch are colliding with the weirdo cult I know way too much about and I hate it

[–] bitofhope@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago

I like the video, but I'm a little bothered that she misattributes su3su2u1's critique to Dan Luu, who makes it very clear he did not write it:

These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr. Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1's identity, I'll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement.

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

Annoying nerd annoyed annoying nerd website doesn't like his annoying posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43489058

(translation: John Gruber is mad HN doesn't upvote his carefully worded Apple tonguebaths)

JWZ: take the win, man

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[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (25 children)

Stackslobber posts evidence that transhumanism is a literal cult, HN crowd is not having it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43459990

[–] sc_griffith@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

I used to think transhumanism was very cool because escaping the misery of physical existence would be great. for one thing, I'm trans, and my experience with my body as such has always been that it is my torturer and I am its victim. transhumanism to my understanding promised the liberation of hundreds of millions from actual oppression.

then I found out there was literally no reason to expect mind uploading or any variation thereof to be possible. and when you think about what else transhumanism is, there's nothing to get excited about. these people don't have any ideas or cogent analysis, just a powerful desire to evade limitations. it's inevitable that to the extent they cohere they're a cult: they're a variety of sovereign citizen

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 13 points 1 week ago

(Geordi LaForge holding up a hand in a "stop" gesture) transhumanism

(Geordi LaForge pointing as if to say "now there's an idea) trans humanism

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

holy shitting fuck, just got the tip of the year in my email

Simplify Your Hiring with AI Video Interviews

Interview, vet, and hire thousands of job applicants through our AI-powered video interviewer in under 3 minutes & 95 languages.

"AI-Video Vetting That Actually Works"

it's called kerplunk.com, a domain named after the sound of your balls disappearing forever

the market is gullible recruiters

founder is Jonathan Gallegos, his linkedin is pretty amazing

other three top execs don't use their surnames on Kerplunk's about page, one (Kyle Schutt) links to a linkedin that doesn't exist

for those who know how Dallas TX works, this is an extremely typical Dallas business BS enterprise, it's just this one is about AI not oil or Texas Instruments for once

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