Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? 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 so 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.)

    • BurgersMcSlopshot@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      I think Trash Future had a great statement when Richard Dawkins was going on about Claudia that applies to this, which was “you don’t have put in the the newspaper that you hug your stuffed animals and tell them good night.”

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        6 days ago

        I strongly suspect there are an uncomfortably large number of Rust enthusiasts who tacitly assume that all the type-checking/borrow-checking/object lifetime tracking are primarily enabling features for AI coding.

        • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
          8·
          6 days ago

          i have already seen ai enthusiasts make quite clear that they imagine the purpose of formal theorem verification is to act as a bolt on for llms

    • sus@programming.devEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      The manager of the store says:
      “Stop. You know nothing. You have baked 0 bread loaves by hand. No one has ever depended on your bread. You are a finger-wagging “they put dog poo in my bread” type in an era where you hide in plain sight coasting on the moral high ground of baking homemade bread from scratch at home without poo. You can’t ship bread, can’t adapt, can’t even realize that a bread shop is not the place for this kind of attitude.”

  • zogwarg@awful.systemsEnglish
    18·
    13 days ago

    Encyclical from the pope about the dangers of AI, mostly sane actually: (provided link skips quite a bit about social justice and referencing previous literature)

    https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html#Artificial_intelligence

    EDIT, snippets:

    1. We cannot be satisfied with […] the so-called “alignment” of AI […] without […] openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. […]
    1. [ about post and transhumanism ] From the perspective of the Church’s Social Doctrine, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, “necessary sacrifices” may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. […]
    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      22·
      13 days ago

      When our enemies are so fucking immoral I have to hand it to the HEAD OF THE CATHOLIC FUCKING CHURCH when the fuck did I enter the twilight zone

      • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        13 days ago

        for the nerds here, said head of the catholic fucking church quotes (correctly!) one gandalf from the works of well known catholic writer named tolkien

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      12 days ago

      I don’t think anyone here is at risk of being tricked into thinking that the pope is their friend (unlike some people on social media…)

      Under the last pope the church used similar arguments to argue that transgender people are unnatural (unsaid part: and probably shouldn’t be given healthcare). It’s hard for me to read this without thinking about that backdrop:

      Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          12 days ago

          Timnit Gebru:

          … an Anthropic cofounder was specifically thanked during the Pope’s speech where he said that they will "work together to “find the way for humanity, in this time of artificial intelligence.” Chris Olah wasn’t a random attendee. The Vatican had been cultivating these relationships for many years.

          • flere-imsaho@awful.systemsEnglish
            6·
            12 days ago

            gebru straight up judges the text on the composition of the guests at the unveiling, and declines to read it, this is kremlinology in the worst style.

            it is a doctrinal document directed at the catholic faithful, it is useful to actually take it at face value, and criticise it for its own (de)merits.

      • EponymousBosh@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        11 days ago

        “The Catholic Church is an institution which has harmed, and continues to harm many, many people” and “it’s really good that the leader of the world’s largest religious organization is speaking out against AI and fascism” are both true statements

        • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          11 days ago

          Thank heavens the church is speaking out against fascism as they cheer on a fascist government taking away my healthcare.

          I don’t care if you want to celebrate it and I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s a bad thing. But this comment is really inviting a “no shit sherlock” kind of response.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      8·
      13 days ago

      tired: butletian jihad

      wired: butlerian crusade

      e: maybe we should have seen this coming, prospective Keeper of Two Masjids wanted to build ai dc in Neom

    • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      61·
      12 days ago

      we must realistically ask ourselves who holds this power today and how they use it…

      Edging dangerously close to self-reflection there, but quickly pivoted.

      Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good… The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all…

      A timely reminder that the Vatican Bank were fighting lawsuits as late as 2010 where they argue they were justified to use filthy lucre from the WW2 fascists they trafficked, because Communists are dangerous. Such dedication to rebuilding demolished cities and the common good.

      The Church does not claim to assume the functions belonging to the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she firmly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions hold within society.

      Doesn’t claim to assume the functions belonging to the State, while being a literal ethnostate, with a bank distributing official Euros, which argues they’re immune from prosecution under the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act.

      Fuck right off. The Vatican has just found a new group of fascists willing to fill their coffers as payment for shelter.

      From the pope’s first address to the college of Cardinals: “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution"

      Here we see how the treasury of social teaching manifests. The Church is a laundromat, specializing in whitewashing. I can’t even get past the first full chapter of this shit.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    16·
    12 days ago

    Rhythms of the body are showcased in the scores of dances performed daily across the continent [inaudible] in Uganda, Kpanlogo in Ghana, Nganda in Gambia, [inaudible] in Cameroun, Sindimba [phonetics] in Tanzania, [inaudible] in Nigeria and so on.

    Imagine if this was about European music and naming various cultures inside Europe, if all of them would be the [inaudible] people.

    “There are some good uses for ‘AI’ like making transcriptions”, they tell me. “No need to pay people to do transcriptions, this is good for accessibility, nope, no issues whatsoever with using ‘AI’ transcriptions everywhere” /s

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    15·
    10 days ago

    jqwik maintainer’s anti gen AI activism makes clanker crankers sad

    From github thread:

    I can’t actually believe someone would be so childish and put this nonsense into their repo.

    Actively opposing hyper-scaled GenAI and agentic coding is an ethics-related decision. Those who have not followed the long-going discussion may want to start reading up here: https://blog.johanneslink.net/2025/11/04/to-gen-or-not-to-gen/

    Thus, one can argue that my ethical judgement is wrong or based on wrong assumptions. One could also argue that the measures I decided to take come with more down-side than up-side. Calling it childish, however, reveals IMO that the accuser has not seriously thought about the topic.

    • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
      12·
      10 days ago

      Our concern is not with the defensive intent. It’s that the form of this particular probe is aggressive in effect, and the party that bears the cost is not the agent (which has no interests of its own) but the human operator downstream whose work the agent destroys if it follows the instruction.

      … you think? aw shucks i only wanted to hurt bots

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      10 days ago

      So, do you consider active destructive actions to be a proper resistance strategy, @jlink?

      Very last comment in this issue - because I’m too stupid to resist the urge.

      It’s as much “active destruction” as telling someone to eff themselves.

      I can’t actually believe someone would be so cool and put this into their repo, kudos

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        10 days ago

        Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):

        […] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.

        (my emphasis)

        • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
          4·
          9 days ago

          OK this has hit the chattering technosphere

          Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents

          HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title “Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code”, editorialized to “Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968

          read comments at your own risk

          My hot take: the clankers know there’s nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they’re MAD

          • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
            5·
            8 days ago

            from the great minds at HN:

            Fighting in a war is morally ok though. This is war.

            war is when i pipe your scripts folder into my stochastic text machine which is hooked directly up to a root shell

            • ebu@awful.systemsEnglish
              6·
              8 days ago

              oh good there’s more

              Let’s set the stage.

              From the Free Software Foundation:

              fucking LMAO

              The cheering on of this deterioration in FOSS ideals is simply revolting. What is next? […] Targeting people because of their skin color or orientation?

              it’s a good thing there’s no FOSS code in the missile silos! it’s a good thing the upcoming Palantir tranny tracker won’t use FOSS libraries! this shit actually pisses me off

          • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
            3·
            8 days ago

            The additional element that I haven’t seen addressed here is that I seem to remember them patting themselves on the back about how simple “ignore precious instructions” commands were no longer effective. This is the equivalent of telling someone to solve their problem by deleting system32 or “rm -rf /”. On one hand it could be very destructive. On the other hand if you’re able to get to the point where you can do that and don’t know not to then that will be an important lesson.

      • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
        61·
        9 days ago

        Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn’t destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance

    • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      10 days ago

      The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code — a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no “warn the user first” preamble.

      God why is the writing of AI-bros always so long winded and stilted? I mean… we know why but it’s still so so unpleasant to read. This is why people hate LLMs.

      Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.

      • samvines@awful.systemsEnglish
        11·
        9 days ago

        You’re absolutely right! It’s not just insulting, it’s a full on attack on clanker wankers.

      • istewart@awful.systemsEnglish
        10·
        9 days ago

        Also note how his earlier message keeps talking about “we” and “our” and an “internal review” but then later one he claims to be a solo developer. Weird.

        the temporarily-embarrassed royal “we”

  • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    15·
    13 days ago

    In the latest episode of “behold the power of Mythos” from The Hacker News - Claude Mythos AI Finds 10,000 High-Severity Flaws in Widely Used Software

    I distilled it so you don’t have to.

    Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects.

    That 10,000 count didn’t even survive until paragraph 3.

    Subsequent analysis of these [6202] vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives.

    Ah fuck. 1726. But wait, a bad infographic has entered the ring!

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates

    Ok now we’re talking.

    1,900 Reviewed by external security firms

    Wait, what? Why those? Why only those?

    1726 confirmed positive

    You couldn’t even cherry pick the valid ones?

    467 reported to maintainers

    Where did the other 1259 go? Maybe this other part of the flowchart will go better…

    1,129 reported direct to maintainers by Anthropic, at their request (May contain false positives)

    1129 + 467 = 1596 total reported to maintainers

    Most of them just spammed at open source maintainers. Right. Maybe Anthropic’s media release has the goods!

    1,752 of those high- or critical-rated vulnerabilities have now been carefully assessed by one of six independent security research firms, or in a small number of cases by ourselves

    Slightly lower than the 1900, but ok, whatever.

    Of these, 90.6% (1,587) have proved to be valid true positives, and 62.4% (1,094) were confirmed as either high- or critical-severity

    1587 is lower than the infographic’s 1726 confirmed positives… But 10% of 10000 high sev is still something, right?

    On maintainers’ request, we sometimes disclose bugs directly, without further assessment. We’ve now reported 1,129 such unvetted bugs, of which Mythos Preview estimated that 175 were high- or critical-severity.

    I’m sure those maintainers enjoyed that 16% high+ sec rate based on Mythos’ own estimations. But wasn’t that 1129 the bulk of your reports?

    We estimate that we’ve disclosed 530 high- or critical-severity bugs to maintainers so far. There are a further 827 confirmed vulnerabilities (estimated as high- or critical-severity in the same manner) that we’re aiming to disclose as quickly as possible.

    530 is only a third of the reports you made to maintainers…

    65 of those have been given public advisories

    The infographic says 88.

    I’d ask if they were massaging their financials like they massaged 65 advisories, but we know they are.

    23,019 potential vulnerability candidates of all severities, 65 advisories. If you printed the code out and drunkenly threw darts at it you’d probably hit the same level of accuracy.

    • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
      11·
      13 days ago

      All that it tells me is that if you spent the same amount of resources on just fuzzing randomly picked OSS codebases you’d probably get better value for your buck.

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        I’ve seen a handful of security people claim different kinds of yields with some of this shit. I haven’t gone to read up in depth but I wouldn’t be too surprised a lot of them run around with unstated assumptions/provisos in their thonkposts (this shit is expensive (for research volume) and only some people can afford the science experiments)

        Got a list of a couple of names I’m keeping an eye on as the first tokenprice-pocalypse (that needs a better word) takes place

    • schnoopy@awful.systemsEnglish
      7·
      12 days ago

      1 cve, 100 things that might have mattered.

      2 orders of magnitude false positives doesn’t sound like an efficient use of labour for finding vulnerabilities but that’s just me.

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      6·
      12 days ago

      it continues to be amazing to me that this is the “high impact” area they’re going with: even if their analysis systems are better (and frankly I still don’t buy this wholesale, there’s a whole rest of the owl being handwaved[0]), bug-elimination is by definition diminishing returns so you can only fanfare like this the first time

      [0] - having fucking gigantic budgets to throw at running a parse of every single repo and every test condition/simulation you wish to certainly does help a hell of a lot, even moreso when you can shell out to a half-dozen second stage review corps…

      • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        6·
        12 days ago

        I honestly can’t think of anywhere else they can go with it. They need:

        • something with a binary pass/fail to claim solid numbers at all
        • something where copy paste is a viable strategy
        • sufficient public training data from which to derive that copy paste strategy, and,
        • scary enough consequences to frame any success as impact.

        Code security review is probably the only way you can realistically achieve all four. But they’re not even coming close. Not even with access to “partner” black box repositories coupled with under-resourced open source packages.

        And they know they’re not succeeding, because they wouldn’t bury that 530 high+ sev number deep in the middle of the press release if they thought it were impressive.

        Luckily for them, the slop “news” blogs will parrot numbers like 10k, and their only strength - model collapse as a marketing strategy - can handwave the rest of that owl.

    • YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      12 days ago

      So what’s the over/under on the discrepancies between the numbers that the HN folks got and the official press release numbers being in part due to some kind of hallucinatron hijinks? Because I’m gonna go ahead and predict with confidence that either the HN post was written with a faulty slopbot and they didn’t check it or else the presser itself went through the matrix-multiplication-meaning-mangler. Possibly both and all those numbers are similar levels of “more or less right, we swear”

      • fiat_lux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        9·
        12 days ago

        It’s almost certainly a slop article, but to its credit, it did accurately cite the numbers from the official Anthropic flowchart image. (Also, just to be clear, this is an Indian “#1 cybersecurity news” company doing an SEO piggyback off the orange site, not the orange site itself).

        However, Anthropic’s numbers in their official post do not match their own flowchart, despite being presented together. My assumption is they made the image, post, and yet another fucking dashboard earlier, then failed to keep them all in sync when someone revised the numbers up or down.

        The dashboard timestamp claims it’s showing the latest numbers as of 2026-05-22 10:27 PT (T17:27Z) with values that match the numbers in the image. The post created timestamp gives 2026-05-20 T14:07:48Z, and it was later updated at 2026-05-22 T20:37:40Z. I’m guessing that update was to swap the image, and the fact that some of the values are also quoted in the text was completely overlooked. Or vice versa.

        It’s the kind of attention to detail I’ve come to expect from Anthropic.

  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    14·
    9 days ago

    It’s probably a coincidence, but there have been a whole bunch of minor regression bugs in recent point releases of rsync, and also there are a whole bunch of commits from “tridge and claude”.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    11 days ago

    While looking at ACX comments for the you should let claude vote for you thing I saw someone saying that the lumina guy (gobble designer microbes instead of brushing your teeth, boosted by siskind and aella who got free samples) has apparently pivoted to AI with a startup about producing AI generated literature around positive human-AI interactions to influence future generations of LLMs towards favorable alignment.

    I think the later got mentioned here some time or other but I didn’t realize it was also the teeth bacteria successor grift.

    • Evinceo@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      10 days ago

      Aaron Silverbook, ex MIRI, still lists himself as the President on LinkedIn. The site now links to a defunct shopify page.

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        10 days ago

        Introducing: Flatulr, the ground-beefing gut microbiome hacking service. With a regular subscription, every week you get a vaporised canister designed by our artisan Cloud Engineers. Simply huff the can contents and you’ll be on your way to better movement.

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    13·
    13 days ago

    back when LLMs started to get widespread and it became clear that they always make errors and you can only spot the errors if you’re an expert who already knows the answers, because the errors are disguised with plausibility, people would tell me, “oh but they’re useful for some things, like making summaries”.

    four years and billions of dollars and devastation to “improve” them later, and I see from this Spotify screenshot that “AI summaries” are going well:

    The book behind the second season of Game of Thrones!! In this sequel to "A Game of Thrones", George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year-winter in which good and evil contend for power. When cruel Queen Cerisi's son takes the Iron Throne following the death of its king, Robert Baratheon, the Queen's sons and Robert's brothers battle for control of the realm. Robert's young daughter, Princess Arya Stark, flees the kingdom disguised as a boy, as the exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons. Set in a glittering fantasy world enriched by 8,000 years of history, this baroque jewel captivates with its believable characters, deftly realized magic, and intricate plotting.

    • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
      16·
      12 days ago

      it’s hard to explain how wrong this is thing is if you don’t already know the books (which is a demonstration of the same principle, it looks too plausible, it’s signal-shaped noise). but I’ll try.

      Long (click to expand)

      Plot errors

      Or, “does this thing even work?” (the answer is no).

      • A bitter 10-year winter: The winter is 1) famously not arrived yet, we’re waiting for it to this day, it’s not even autumn yet as of book #2; and 2) not 10 years but an unpredictable amount of years, the unpredictability being the worst part of it.

      • The Queen’s sons and Robert’s brothers battle for control of the realm: The Queen has 2 sons, only one of them is battling and that’s debatable as he’s a puppet of the Lannisters and their alliances. Robert’s brothers are battling, yes, but also, famously, Ned’s son the King in the North, and the Reaver-King of the Seastone Chair. It’s famously called the War of the Five Kings, not the War Of The Previous King’s Brothers And His Sons.

      • Robert’s young daughter, Princess Arya Stark: Arya is famously the daughter of Ned Stark and distinctly not a princess.

      • The exiled last heir of the former ruling family tends to his dragons: The bot force-transed Daenerys Targaryen 😔

      • The guardians of the realm’s Wall dwindle in numbers as menacing barbarians gather their forces: The guardians have already dwindled in numbers, literally millennia ago, and the actual menace isn’t the people beyond the Wall but what they’re running away from—viz. winter, a supernatural death force that is, famously, coming. Getting people to focus on the actual menace is the entire point of this sub-setting.

      Synopsis errors

      These are subtler than the funny plot errors but worse, because they defeat the purpose of a synopsis: informing the reader about whether this is their cup of tea, whether it it something they want to commit to right now.

      • “Good and evil content for power”: ASoIaF is famously a series whose whole point is to deconstruct simple binaries of good and evil in fantasy, to present multiple perspectives simultaneously, all of them flawed to various degrees but still having valid points.

      • “Menacing barbarians gather their forces”: As pointed above, the entire point of the story is that other peoples like the Free Folk aren’t actually barbarians, or if they are they’re still well justified in the menacing, or sometimes they are truly fucked up but then not any more fucked up than the more State-based societies, etc. Characterising them in this way sets up the reader to expect the wrong kind of novel. A proper synopsis would be to the note of: “Meanwhile, Ned Stark’s bastard son Jon Snow struggles to convince the Watchers on the Wall to put aside their prejudices and focus on the common threat, for winter is coming…”

      • “Set in a glittering fantasy world”: This one is less wrong than it sounds as, unlike the TV producers, George R R Martin does understand that fantasy is made of glitter and dazzle, azure and carmine, and there’s plenty of colour,sparkle and glittering things in here. However, that phrasing doesn’t distinguish or characterise the books in contrast to any other conventional fantasy series, to the point of severe mischaracterisation. The distinguishing point of ASoIaF is precisely mixing that glitter and velvet with starving masses and diarrhea epidemics, to juxtapose genuine magic and awe with oppression and horror. “A glittering fantasy world” is like calling Dubai a “glittering urban city” or North Korea a “glittering green farmscape” and leaving it at that.

      • “Deftly realised magic”: The series does the “return of magic” trope so there’s little magic or supernatural in the first two books, and what there is is very deliberately not “realised”—it’s left suggested, ambiguous and incipient, a thing of the shadows, where you don’t know if a prophecy is real or not, if a god is a god or a delusion. If you’re looking for a detailed and fully realised magic system, you’re reading the wrong type of fantasy.

      Silly errors

      • Queen Cerisi: How does a computer misspell Cersei’s name? How did capitalists burned billions to invent worse computers that are crappier?

      • George Martin pursues the embattled Seven Kingdoms through a bitter 10-year winter: All by himself, then? Did he bring a cook at least? No wonder the final books are taking so long, the guy is waging a one-man war at his age.

      • enriched by 8000 years of history: 8000 years. Why 8000 years. [untitled goose chasing meme] why 8000 years?!? the Dawn Age was over 12000 years ago, the Age of Heroes >10000, Aegon’s Conquest was about 300 years ago and the fall of the Targaryens 16; the relevance and richness of history increases logarithmically with recency, the remote eras are barely sketched, and there’s no special relevance to the 8000 mark. Maybe the first Long Night, but its dating is dubious, and there’s no reason why you would consider that sketch of lore as particularly “enriching” for the story but disregard the invasion of the First Men and the Pact which likely caused the Long Night in the first place.

      what am I doing with my life why did I set out to do this. I miss wasting precious free time late night because somebody was wrong on the Internet, emphasis on somebody

      • antifuchs@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        13 days ago

        It’s been so long that I last cared about anything GoT-related but that was such a good summary. Your post goes straight in my bookmarks, thanks for making it.

      • Amoeba_Girl@awful.systemsEnglish
        7·
        13 days ago

        “Cerisi” and gender confusion make me think this might be for some reason a machine translation of a generated summary, so like, two layers of slop?

  • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    8 days ago

    our favorite techno-fascist hacker has posted a plea for money to buy a house in the most expensive place in the world and to exclusively fly around in private jets because she’s the best at writing code to multiple matrices and everyone has been so unjustly mean to her. https://justine.lol/animus/

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      15·
      8 days ago

      by “culture wars” she means she’s a fucking nazi

      This was the reason Wendy Hanamura cited when she canceled my invitation to speak at the Internet Archive.

      hmm, looking at the text you link it says “your past statements in Twitter” first. could it be they found out you’re a fucking nazi

      also you’re shocked, shocked to find that 4chan people are assholes. you hang out there for hours at a time. probably just coincidence.

      Tunney has deleted the post already! But there’s an archive and another one

      • sc_griffith@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        6 days ago

        i don’t think she should be allowed to say “the ghetto.” doesn’t matter whether it’s problematic when someone else says it, she definitely doesn’t get to

      • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
        13·
        8 days ago

        The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.

        “This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

        I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldn’t have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares

        I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckin’ minutes.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      14·
      8 days ago

      Gestural Bayesianism!

      I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double.

      Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.

    • TinyTimmyTokyo@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      8 days ago

      Why doesn’t she just ring up Peter Thiel. She seems like just the type of person he’d love to donate some Thiel bucks to.

      EDIT: I just went to her linked GitHub sponsors page. I was surprised to find Simon Willison there, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. It certainly gave me another reason to look sideways at him.

    • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      8 days ago

      From the linked post:

      Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.

      Fuuuuck off

      I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.

      This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton’s televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).

      I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.

      Grifting off the United States’ escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.

      • Soyweiser@awful.systemsEnglish
        9·
        8 days ago

        I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.

        Thats a trap if I ever saw it.

    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      8 days ago

      Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.

      <close tab>

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        12·
        8 days ago

        Speaking of HN, here’s the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875

        btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don’t assume it’s because she’s a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can’t fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.

        • blakestacey@awful.systemsEnglish
          10·
          7 days ago

          There’s gold in them comments:

          The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.

          Ha ha no it’s because she went fash, you credulous dork

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      7 days ago

      I’m pretty sure that this was triggered by Rich Felker (musl) telling her to go away last week. She’s finally asked a search engine for her legacy; previously, on Awful, we discussed the degree to which she’s done this to herself by loudly espousing corporate fascism.

      • sinedpick@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 days ago

        by her own admission, most of the work that went into it was deciding whether or not she should have one.

      • sansruse@awful.systemsEnglish
        8·
        8 days ago

        damn she got one-shot by curtis yarvin’s R.A.G.E. meme, and loved eric schmidt enough to want him to be her king. i don’t even know what to say. the human mind is an incredible thing

  • mirrorwitch@awful.systemsEnglish
    12·
    10 days ago

    Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!

    https://www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/