this post was submitted on 18 May 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 1 points 5 months ago
[–] yellowcake@awful.systems 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I missed predatory company Klarna declares themselves as AI company. CEO loves to spout how much of the workforce was laid off to be replaced with “AI” and their latest earnings report the CEO was an “AI avatar” delivering the report. Sounds like they should have laid him off first.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/klarna-used-an-ai-avatar-of-its-ceo-to-deliver-earnings-it-said/

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he's supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.

Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.

It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.

Personally, I've not been impressed with Ive's design work in the past many years. Well, I'm sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how "unapologetically honest" the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I'm not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.

The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?

I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for "the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s", and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.

[–] o7___o7@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Our subjects here at awful systems can make us angry. They can spend lots of money to make everything worse. They can even make us dead if things go really off the rails, but one thing they can never do is make us take them seriously.

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Here's a video of a Tesla vehicle taking the saying "move fast and break things" to heart.

[–] V0ldek@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Aren't you supposed to only use whatever "self-driving" nonsense they have on highways only? I thought Tesla explicitly says you can't do it on a normal road cause, well, it doesn't fucking work.

It doesn't even seem the driver is actually holding the wheel like they don't try to avoid that at all

Just a second before the crash a car goes by, this thing could've just as easily swerved right onto that other car and injured someone, someone should at least lose their license for this

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[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Friend of mine witnessed some bleak shit, now you get to see it too:

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[–] dovel@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Oof that’s the good stuff. Chuds with overly self-inflated egos co-opting eastern philosophy for tech shit is pretty well known around these parts. It’s refreshing to see it from a slightly different white guy.

Also, my usual muckraking bore unexpected fruit:

I’m gonna believe it. The Candace Owens part is disputed, and I daresay debunked, though.

text of tweet inside imageFrom @BootsRiley:

Now is as good a time as any to tell people that Rick Rubin is a behind-the-scenes rightwinger who tries to recruit music industry folks to Q-anon type stuff and is who (according to Kanye) convinced Kanye to meet Candace Owens and endorse Trump.

He just looks like a hippie.

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[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Double quick ssc sneer, why is he platforming a groyper, without mentioning it is a groyper, does he know what groypers are. Why is he acting like this is a honest question and not an attempt to create hierarchies and unpersons? Why are people confusing remembering being conscious with remembering things at all? Why are people confusing consciousness with agency? Why do I hear the "empathy removal training center" warning sound again. And the most personal question. People remember not being conscious? But yes, wtf Scott, how do you even find these groypers?

Anybody have the current count on platforming neonazis vs platforming sneerclubbers?

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

God this is so fucking stupid. Aren't these people supposed to be at least minimally smart in some way, like knowing about biases and things? And here they are trying to suss out the deep workings of conscious experience from the just-so narratives people have attached to their memories of memories of memories. Pathetic.

[–] Amoeba_Girl@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Comments comments

I don't recall having some sort of a wow experience like "damn, I'm a conscious human being" now ever, which kind of makes me question if I'm conscious even now.

I'm also in the same boat. But also, I think that we can only experience consciousness with our whole being, and there's not much "compute" and bandwidth left even amongst fully grown adults - to verify if even the baseline "adult" consciousness that we're experiencing is the baseline "real and complete adult state of consciousness" that everyone is definitely experiencing. And so we're left to ponder some subset of the thing we want to understand and control fully.

I mean, the "consciousness" that you and I experience, as adults, are almost certainly reduced or different compared to what, say, Scott experiences daily. Neither you nor I (nor most people) can write like Scott can, but Scott bangs out riveting and beautiful pieces of writing effortlessly at least once a week and wonders why everyone else can't.

Jesus Christ mate

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[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

We've had one AI legal filing yes, but what about second AI legal filing?

https://bsky.app/profile/debgoldendc.bsky.social/post/3lpjr7i6lrs2n

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677/gov.uscourts.alnd.179677.186.0.pdf

Instead, Defendant appears to have wholly invented case citations in his Motion for Leave, possibly through the use of generative artificial intelligence

Defendant bolstered this assertion with a lengthy string citation of legal authority and parentheticals that appeared to support Defendant’s proposition. But the entire string citation appears to have been made up out of whole cloth.

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

this makes me wonder how many spicy autocomplete fakes like that aren't caught

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 5 months ago

a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol

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