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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
is anyone else fucking sick and tired of discord? itās one thing if itās gaming-related[1], but when iām at a repo for some non-gaming project and they say āask for help in our discord serverā, i feel like iām in a fever dream and iām going to wake up and discover that the simulation i was in was managed by chatgpt
i guess. not really, fuck discord. ā©ļø
this is gonna live in my head forever without paying any rent and i am upset
and so i pass on the burden, like a virus, to all those who seek truth but must instead whip out their phone to scan a QR code and then get welcome-pinged 18 times in #general
Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isnāt accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discordās search feature fucking sucks.
Also logging is hard, all the various channels are annoying (esp as th, and having to jump through various hoops just get into channels (hoops for which the instructions can be outdated/bad (one of them used a feature that was disabled on my machine for some reason, but nobody had realized that was possible)) is just nuts. And then there is the whole thing that Discord itself wants to make the platform as busy as possible by adding more and more moving things. I just want to chat.
From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Letās delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:
- Every goddamn article reads like this now.
- With this bullet point list at some point.
- I am going to tear the eyes off my head
Another day of living under the indignity of this cruel, ignorant administration.
Ran across a pretty solid sneer: Every Reason Why I Hate AI and You Should Too.
Found a particularly notable paragraph near the end, focusing on the people focusing on āprompt engineeringā:
In fear of being replaced by the hypothetical āAI-accelerated employeeā, people are forgoing acquiring essential skills and deep knowledge, instead choosing to focus on āprompt engineeringā. Itās somewhat ironic, because if AGI happens there will be no need for āprompt-engineersā. And if it doesnāt, the people with only surface level knowledge who cannot perform tasks without the help of AI will be extremely abundant, and thus extremely replaceable.
You want my take, Iād personally go further and say the people who canāt perform tasks without AI will wind up borderline-unemployable once this bubble bursts - theyāre gonna need a highly expensive chatbot to do anything at all, theyāre gonna be less productive than AI-abstaining workers whilst falsely believing theyāre more productive, theyāre gonna be hated by their coworkers for using AI, and theyāre gonna flounder if forced to come up with a novel/creative idea.
All in all, any promptfondlers still existing after the bubble will likely be fired swiftly and struggle to find new work, as they end up becoming significant drags to any companyās bottom line.
Promptfondling really does feel like the dumbest possible middle ground. If youāre willing to spend the time and energy learning how to define things with the kind of language and detail that allows a computer to effectively work on them, we already have tools for that: theyāre called programming languages. Past a certain point trying to optimize your ānatural languageā prompts to improve your odds from the LLM gacha youāre doing the digital equivalent sot trying to speak a foreign language by repeating yourself louder and slower.
ChatControl is back on the table here in Europe AGAIN (youāve probably heard), with mandatory age checking sprinkled on to as a treat.
I honestly feel physically ill at this point. Like a constant, unignorable digital angst eating away at my sanity. I donāt want any part in this shit anymore.
ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australiaās age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSAā¦ yeah.
Yes, of course, itās everywhere. Whatās left but becoming a hermitā¦?
But you know what makes me extra mad about the age restrictions? I donāt think they are a bad idea per se. Keeping teens from watching porn or kids from spending most of their waking hours on brainrot on social media is, in and on itself, a good idea. What does make me mad is that this could easily be done in a privacy-respecting fashion (towards site providers and governments simultaneously). The fact that it isnāt - that youāll need to share your real, passport-backed identity with a bunch of sites - tells you everything you need to know about these endeavors, I think.
Would you mind explaining how to do that easily in a way that only reveals age without being a privacy nightmare? Which means that it mustnāt be giving sites an excellent tracking identifier nor requires them to process documents themselves.
Iād have imagined something along these lines:
- USER visits porn site
- PORN site encrypts random nonce + āis this user 18?ā with GOV pubkey
- PORN forwards that to USER
- USER forwards that to GOV, together with something authenticating themselves (need to have GOV account)
- GOV knows user is requesting, but not what for
- GOV checks: is user 18?, concats answer with random nonce from PORN, hashes that with known algo, signs the entire thing with its private signing key
- GOV returns that to USER
- USER forwards that to PORN
- PORN is able to verify that whoever made the request to visit PORN is verified as older than 18 by singing key holder / GOV, by checking certificate chain, and gets freshness guarantee from random nonce
- but PORN does not know anything about the user (besides whether they are an adult or not)
Thereās probably glaring issues with this, this is just from the top of my head to solve the problem of āGOV should know nothingā.
PORN site encrypts random nonce
Really unfortunate word in this context. (Not your fault of course.)
Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.
E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol
ed zitron must feel so vindicated rn https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-high-costs-and-thin-margins-threatening-ai-coding-startups/
Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):
Needless to say, heās getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.
Yes, doing the thing which the entire business world is pouring billions into and trying their hardest to shove onto everyone to maximize imagined future profits, thatās what counterculture is all about.
Sorry to talk about this couple again, but people are discovering the eugenicists are also big time racists
This is just haplessly comical. The AI-generated sinister hijab lady, the attempts at algorithm-compliant YouTube face, the fact that theyāre doing this instead of raising their kids (which may be beneficial for the kids in the long runā¦) Who do they imagine theyāre convincing?
The problem is āarabā. I wonāt make generalizations of Arab. Thatās just where you were born. Cant affect where you were squirted out of a womb.
But Islam? In reality, all the major YHVH religions see women as possessions or second class citizens. That applies to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.
And seriously, even Hinduism and Buddhism too discriminate against women as well. Those are #4 and #5 world religions.
The only set of religions that treat women and men equally are Western Paganism. Women and Men are equal. Like, actually equal. Not fake not-really-equal.
Ah, yes, Western Paganism is famed for its uniformity of belief and complete lack of objectionable people saying hateful things. (Pay no attention to the Nazis behind the curtain, theyāre not Real Pagansā¢.)
Btw, the āteen pregnancyā thing, is prob a bit ahistorical. If we use teen marriages as a standing for teen pregnancies, these were historically very low. (contrary to what people believe about the past, mostly because strategic marriages by rich people/nobles were not, but those people were not normal people) See: https://bsky.app/profile/nogoodwyfe.bsky.social/post/3lv2ehbn7pc2x
But reactionaries gotta go back to some imagined ideal past. No matter what actually learned people say. (and that is also why the far right is anti-intellectual).
Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.
(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)
I assume they donāt know teen pregnancies peaked in the 90s.
Wait, are those AMERICANS asking:
āIs the Arab brain š§ incompatible with democracy?ā
The Americans who overthrew an Iranian democracy to install a dictator and are currently overthrowing their own elected government so they can be ruled by dictator? Those Americans?
š¤£š
Most inhabitants of Iran would dislike being called Arabsā¦ but I guess the lazy racists are just using it as a shorthand for ābrown people who are Muslimā
Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing peopleās data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.
Personally, Iām expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflareās just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.
Archive.is because substack sucks. Remember Peter Todd, the ghost in the LLMs? New one of them dropped. Elara Voss
I noticed starting a couple weeks ago that archive.is is requiring me to complete captchas nearly every time I visit. Are other people experiencing this? If so, I wonder if the siteās maintainers are reacting to increased traffic from LLM crawlers. The crawlers probably find Archive extraordinarily useful when they get blocked by source sites.
If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability
(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since itās the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)
(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)
Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.
Iām aware of the cloudflare issue, and I donāt use them. So Iām pretty sure itās not that. (I use firefox but I turn off DNS over HTTPS)
They get mad at any DNS server that strips/doesnāt include EDNS subnet info (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDNS_Client_Subnet)
NextDNS was another that would give me endless captchas.
