blakestacey

joined 2 years ago
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[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Well, now the students have incentive to record all the stages of their progress. And the professors have incentive to assign projects in stages, each one of which has a tangible output. It's the golden age of the index card, baby! Fill out one for each idea or claim you want to use from a book you read, wrap the stack with a rubber band... This oddly dovetails with the professors' obligations, since now we have to teach how to do research all over again.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

A major Australian university used artificial intelligence technology to accuse about 6,000 students of academic misconduct last year.

The most common offence was using AI to cheat, but many of the students had done nothing wrong.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-09/artificial-intelligence-cheating-australian-catholic-university/105863524

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

I converted this to LaTeX and made a version that looks all official and spiffy. In the process, I edited the paragraph about the "Ask me anything" chapter, so I modified that paragraph here to match.

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

We won't have any usable web browsers, but that's OK, because there won't be a web worth browsing.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Perhaps, one day, someone will talk about "the people that downvoted me" without sounding like a total goober. But that day is not today.

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

Counterpoint: Celebrating Hitler's death is good, actually. Celebrate Hitler's death on the train, on the boat, wherever good times are had!

I'm glad to see that another mod has already pushed the fuck off with you button.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

A new psychology preprint argues that "contemporary AI is research misconduct".

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

In the Financial Times:

The hundreds of billions of dollars companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year. And some analysts believe that estimate doesn’t fully capture the AI spend, so the real share could be even higher.

AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in US stocks so far in 2025. That is helping to fund and drive US growth, as the AI-driven stock market draws in money from all over the world, and feeds a boom in consumer spending by the rich.

Since the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population own 85 per cent of US stocks, they enjoy the largest wealth effect when they go up. Little wonder then that the latest data shows America’s consumer economy rests largely on spending by the wealthy. The top 10 per cent of earners account for half of consumer spending, the highest share on record since the data begins.

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 57 points 1 week ago

With Grok, Grokipedia aims for maximum truth through first principles and physics.

Fuck you.

Signed,

a physicist

[–] blakestacey@awful.systems 30 points 1 week ago (1 children)

zoom and enhance

By Doug Melville, Contributor.

The Forbes "contributor" hive strikes again.

To quote the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary),

Most content on Forbes.com is written by contributors or "Senior Contributors" with minimal editorial oversight, and is generally unreliable. Editors show consensus for treating Forbes.com contributor articles as self-published sources, unless the article was written by a subject-matter expert. Forbes.com contributor articles should never be used for third-party claims about living persons.

 

Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.

 

Bumping this up from the comments.

 

Was anyone else getting a 503 error for a little while today?

 

Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!

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.

 

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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.

 

Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.

 

Tesla's troubled Cybertruck appears to have hit yet another speed bump. Over the weekend, dozens of waiting customers reported that their impending deliveries had been canceled due to "an unexpected delay regarding the preparation of your vehicle."

Tesla has not announced an official stop sale or recall, and as of now, the reason for the suspended deliveries is unknown. But it's possible the electric pickup truck has a problem with its accelerator. [...] Yesterday, a Cybertruck owner on TikTok posted a video showing how the metal cover of his accelerator pedal allegedly worked itself partially loose and became jammed underneath part of the dash. The driver was able to stop the car with the brakes and put it in park. At the beginning of the month, another Cybertruck owner claimed to have crashed into a light pole due to an unintended acceleration problem.

Meanwhile, layoffs!

 

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history.

 

[Eupalinos of Megara appears out of a time portal from ancient Ionia] Wow, you guys must be really good at digging tunnels by now, right?

 

In October, New York City announced a plan to harness the power of artificial intelligence to improve the business of government. The announcement included a surprising centerpiece: an AI-powered chatbot that would provide New Yorkers with information on starting and operating a business in the city.

The problem, however, is that the city’s chatbot is telling businesses to break the law.

 

a lesswrong: 47-minute read extolling the ambition and insights of Christopher Langan's "CTMU"

a science blogger back in the day: not so impressed

[I]t’s sort of like saying “I’m going to fix the sink in my bathroom by replacing the leaky washer with the color blue”, or “I’m going to fly to the moon by correctly spelling my left leg.”

Langan, incidentally, is a 9/11 truther, a believer in the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and much more besides.

 

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

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 here 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.

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