this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025

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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.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th January 2025 - awful.systems - awful.systems (awful.systems)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/

you'd think it's a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is

for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more "impressive" c-suite fooling machine

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Let them fight.gif

Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. [...] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.

One word: Foxconn

I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.

Ed Zitron:

[mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn't that meant to be a Microsoft project?

Hey wasn't that project contingent on "meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI's AI"?

(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Karl Bode comments:

I like how none of the reporting I've seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbank's multi-year, very obvious history of failures

I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Somehow, Ross Ulbricht returned

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly "hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!"

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Ah yes that will be good for international relations and the morale of law enforcement and anti cybercrime people. Lol it is all so stupid.

This and the releasing of the jan 6 people who assaulted cops (one cop who testified against them got a shitton of messages they got early release) is going to do wonders. Not that it will shake the belief of a lot of people that the repubs are the party of back the blue and law and order.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives for programs as stuff is ennshitfying, rot economying, slurping up your data, going all in on llms etc https://european-alternatives.eu/ might help. Have not looked into it myself btw.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero

My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.

I couldn't locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various "tasks" to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.

Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera "device" to record ones every waking moment.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (16 children)

Rationalist death count keeps climbing https://xcancel.com/jessi_cata/status/1882182975804363141#m

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