Want to wade into the rainbow-ridden 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.)
Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/
he was most frustrated a couple of weeks back when people called bullshit on his previous round of takes about this
there continues to be a rather particular shade of selfishness involved in each these-shape takes I keep seeing. it's always about how the prompt is for them, how dare anyone else not believe them? and what do you mean externalities we're not talking about power plants we're talking about them
it's exhausting
Ugh, *yes. *
And I really do sympathise with the urge to avoid being seen as extreme (imagine being percieved! by people!) but that urge leads so many clued-in folks to pose the problem of bullshit engines as a halved-loaf problem when it's a halved-baby situation, and the opposition isnt going to give anyone credit for being nice in the newapaper.
My experience is that almost all these cases are effectively "ChatGPT are fixing my attention problems" (not necessarily full ADHD, just people feeling it's easier with an impulsion no matter how random) For me, it's worth paying attention too, but more in the sense "what does it reveal in people ?"
Edit : also, one of his example :
2005 spell checkers find all of these reasonably well.
(and, in fact, the only two reasonable examples he give is the innocence project - but it's an attention span thing - and the full text indexing one which is the exact use case LLMs were developped for and is inherently non generative)
Do we have to believe gamblers who say they've got a "system"?
Hey, dont mock the gamblers and their systems. One of them actually works. You just need infinite money for it.
only 8% of the time
I had some good fun learning about the different roulette systems recently. along with how many places say they're typeA when they're typeB
but then they do operate in a target rich environment :|
Yah and sign up for their newsletter too
I mean, I think he is entirely too credulous of people who claim to be doing things better with AI and discounts a lot of the possible costs of AI systems that malfunction silently and produce plausible bullshit. But I think that those elements complicate his point more than they fully contradict it. Like, consider his last example. Lawyers looking for possible cases for something like the innocence project have to start somewhere, and I can fully believe that the kind of statistical analysis marketing itself as AI is going to be able to pick out viable leads better than doing it randomly or alphabetically or whatever, and that might save the lawyers time and let them help more people than they otherwise would have. But by replacing a naive algorithm with an opaque one you're essentially baking in any underlying biases in the current system. The people who aren't going to get seen now are still probably not going to get seen unless they're right on the margins somehow, and that "somehow" is almost certainly going to be racism, sexism, etc. But by moving that bias from the immediate decision and placing it in the AI model it becomes that much harder to unpack, identify, and address. Like, I fully agree that much if not most of the harm being done by AI right now is more tied to the business and economic structures that it's embedded in rather than the technology itself. There are very good reasons why so many crypto/metaverse/nft grifters moved straight to AI, and when they try and move on to quantum or web67 or whatever else comes next they will keep right on hurting the world in the same ways unless something about those structures changes. But that doesnt necessary mean we shouldn't also focus on the harms and limitations that are inherent to the way these things function rather than how they're used.