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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Duolingo CEO says AI is a better teacher than humans—but schools will still exist ‘because you still need childcare’

It's wild for the CEO of an edutainment company to have this much disdain for for teachers.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 4 hours ago
[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 12 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

Urgh over the past month I have seen more and more people on social media using chat-gpt to write stuff for them, or to check facts, and getting defensive instead of embarrassed about it.

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud -- but I'd lie if I said I wasn't worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population (and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 7 points 18 hours ago

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud

Yell at cloud computing instead, that is usually justified.

More seriously: it's not at all that. The AI pushers want to make people feel that way -- "it's inevitable", "it's here to stay", etc. But the threat to learning and maintaining skills is real (although the former worries me more than the latter -- what has been learned before can often be regained rather quickly, but what if learning itself is inhibited?).

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Maybe this is a bit old woman yells at cloud – but I’d lie if I said I wasn’t worried about language proficiency atrophying in the population

AI's already destroying people's cognitive abilities as we speak, I wouldn't be shocked if language proficiency went down the shitter, too. Hell, you could argue it'll fuck up human's capacity to make/understand art - Nathan Hamiel of Perilous Tech already did.

(and leading to me having to read slop all the time)

Thankfully, I've managed to avoid reading/seeing slop for the most part. Spending most of my time on Newgrounds probably helped, for three main reasons:

  1. AI slop was banned from being uploaded back in 2022 (very early into the bubble), making it loud and clear that AI slop is unwelcome there. (Sidenote: A dedicated AI flag option was added in 2024)
  2. The site primarily (if not near-exclusively) attracts artists, animators, musicians, and creatives in general - all groups who (for obvious reasons) are strongly opposed to gen-AI in all its forms, and who will avoid anything involving AI like the fucking plague.
  3. The site is (practically) ad-free, meaning ad revenue is effectively zero - as such, setting up an AI slop farm (or a regular content mill) is utterly impractical, since you'd have zero shot of turning a profit.

(That I'm a NEET also helps (can't have AI bro coworkers if you're unemployed :P), but any opportunity to promote the AI-free corners of the net is always a good one in my books :P)

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 8 points 10 hours ago

can’t have AI bro coworkers if you’re unemployed :P

I'd certainly feel less conflicted yelling about AI if I didn't work for a big tech company that's gaga for AI. I almost wrote out a long angsty reply but I don't want to give up too much personal details in a single comment.

I guess I ended up as a boiled frog. If I knew how much AI nonsense I'd be incidentally exposed to over the last year I would have quit a year ago. And yet currently I don't quit for complicated reasons. I'm not that far from the breaking point, but I'm going to try to hang in for a few more years.

But yeah, I'm pretty uncomfortable working for a company that has also veered closer to allying with techo-fascism in recent years; and I am taking psychic damage.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 19 hours ago (2 children)
[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 6 points 7 hours ago

“LaSota also bragged to me (my interpretation, I admit) that her theory must be cool because it had had a huge effect on her friend Chris/Maia Pasek,” Salamon said in an email. “Namely, it had (according to LaSota) caused Pasek to kill themself.”

"people commit suicide after meeting me" is a weird thing to brag about

[–] mlen@awful.systems 3 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

The reader mode in Firefox shows completely different version of the article, weird. I never understood how that feature works, is there some node that contains the site supplied version of text for that mode?

[–] fullsquare@awful.systems 3 points 7 hours ago

That's the same article, it just skips title but leaves subtitle

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 10 points 21 hours ago

Update on the Artificial Darth Debacle: SAG-AFTRA just sued Epic for using AI for Darth Vader in the first place:

You want my take, this is gonna be a tough case for SAG - Jones signed off on AI recreations of Vader before his death in 2024, so arguing a lack of consent's off the table right from the get-go.

If SAG do succeed, the legal precedent set would likely lead to a de facto ban on recreating voices using AI. Given SAG-AFTRA's essentially saying that what Epic did is unethical on principle, I suspect that's their goal here.

[–] nightsky@awful.systems 8 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Grok is coming to Azure.

My opinion of Microsoft has gone through many stages over time.

In the late 90s I hated them, for some very good reasons but admittedly also some bad and silly reasons.

This carried over into the 2000s, but in the mid-to-late 00s there was a time when I thought they had changed. I used Windows much more again, I bought a student license of Office 2007 and I used it for a lot of uni stuff (Word finally had decent equation entry/rendering!). And I even learned some Win32, and then C#, which I really liked at the time.

In the 2010s I turned away from Windows again to other platforms, for mostly tech-related reasons, but I didn't dislike Microsoft much per se. This changed around the release of Win 10 with its forced ~~spyware~~ ~~privacy violation~~ telemetry since I categorically reject such coercion. Suddenly Microsoft did one of the very things that they were wrongly accused of doing 15 years earlier.

Now it's the 2020s and they push GenAI on users with force, and then they align with fascists (see link at the beginning of this comment). I despise them more now than I ever did before, I hope the AI bubble burst will bankrupt them.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 3 points 18 hours ago

That reminds me, remember there is an Xbox boycott going on for all the gamers out there. (Saw that after the boycot was started, both steam and humble pushed xbox game sales, the timing of which is very iffy).

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 10 points 1 day 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 5 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 8 points 1 day ago
[–] Architeuthis@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Scoot makes the case that agi could have murderbot factories up and running in a year if it wanted to https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kp3qdh/how_openai_could_build_a_robot_army_in_a_year/

edit: Wrote it up

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

Seems it was deleted. But due to reddit being reddit I noticed it pointed towards the 'Swat Man: Volume 1 Kindle Edition' amazon link. (Which I have not reproduced here)

E: ah nevermind aggressive adblockers deleted it on my end.

[–] sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Not deleted. It's just that the reddit programmers either DGAF or don't know what they're doing.

But yeah this one confused me. He appears to be a movie director / producer / writer and has a couple festival films under his belt. Nothing successful enough to get any buzz as far as I can tell.

Imagine working towards a Hollywood career for years and years only to write an AI-drawn comic book that, based on the title, misses the point of The Punisher. People he pitches his movie ideas to are going to assume he wrote the script with an LLM.

[–] Soyweiser@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

That gives me a 'you broke reddit' jackrobertsofficial is also empty for me (and empty if I use an incognito window, so I'm not blocked). I got the feeling that might be what was going on. Even if I had a hard time finding his old work, as the news articles he links on his own site were dead.

E: tried on my phone and it appears wtf, no wait. It is promoted, my addblockers just nuked it haha, my bad.