this post was submitted on 17 Aug 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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[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 40 minutes ago
[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 7 points 6 hours ago (3 children)

got sent this image

wonder how many more of these things we'll see before people start having a real bileful response to this (over and above the fact that a number of people have been warning about exactly this outcome for a while now)

(transcript below)

transcripttitle: I gave my mom's company an Al automation and now she and her coworkers are unemployed

body: So this is eating me alive and I don't really know where else to put it. I run this little agency that builds these Al agents for staffing firms. Basically the agent pre-screens candidates, pulls the info into a neat report, and sends it back so recruiters don't waste hours on screening calls. It's supposed to be a tool, not a replacement.

My mom works at this mid sized recruiting company. She's always complained about how long it takes to qualify candidates, so I set them up with one of my agents just to test it. It crushed it. Way faster, way cheaper, and honestly more consistent than most of their team.

Fast forward two months and they've quietly laid off almost her whole department. Including my mom. I feel sick. Like I built something that was supposed to help people, and instead it wiped out my mom's job and her team. I keep replaying it in my head like I basically automated my own family out of work.

[–] shapeofquanta@lemmy.vg 2 points 1 hour ago

Gonna have to agree with zogwarg here. I checked out the Reddit profile (which was deleted while I was looking at it, funnily enough) and they're a self-proclaimed entrepreneur whose one-man "agency" has zero clients and yet to even have an idea, attempting to crowdsource the latter on r/entrepreneur.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 6 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Pressing F for doubt, looks like a marketing scam to me.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 1 points 47 minutes ago

that or some kind of bait

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 1 points 1 hour ago

I didn't dig into the post/username at all so I can't guesstimate likelihood of this! get where you're coming from

(......I really need to finish my blog relaunch (this thought brought to you by the explication I was about to embark on in this context))

(((it's soon.gif tho!)))

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

'set them up with'

Anybody want to bet if they did it for free?

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 2 points 1 hour ago

could go either way tbh

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 6 points 6 hours ago

New piece from the Financial Times: Tech utterly dominates markets. Should we worry?

Pulling out a specific point, the article's noted how market concentration is higher now than it was in the dot-com bubble back in 2000:

You want my overall take, I'm with Zitron - this is quite a narrative shift.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 5 hours ago

Xe Iaso's chimed in on the GPT-5 fallout, giving her thoughts on chatbots' use as assistants/therapists.

[–] irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 7 hours ago

Ai scrapers have managed to bypass anubis on codeberg: https://programming.dev/post/35852706

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 4 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Not sure why this "member of technical staff at METR" felt the need to post about the lowered productivity of Black people in the southern US states after slavery was abolished. I'm sure it's nothing.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zr37dY5YPRT6s56jY/thomas-kwa-s-shortform?commentId=iwGgqsmpY6Tcex5je

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 2 points 3 hours ago

Free people have less prodictivity, time to wirehead everyone! A Brave New World!