[-] rook@awful.systems 16 points 4 days ago

I suppose it was inevitable that the insufferable idiocy that software folk inflict on other fields would eventually be turned against their own kind.

https://xkcd.com/1831/

alt textAnd xkcd comic.

Long haired woman: or field has been struggling with this problem for years!

Laptop wielding techbro: struggle no more! I’m here to solve it with algorithms.

6 months later:

Techbro: this is really hard Woman: You don’t say.

[-] rook@awful.systems 24 points 1 month ago

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

  1. The owner is a nazi
  2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
  3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
  4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

[-] rook@awful.systems 30 points 2 months ago

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

[-] rook@awful.systems 23 points 2 months ago

Mmm. There’s certainly nothing else about any of the people or projects involved that’s likely to be a source of fuss, either.

No sir, nothing but apolitical dramaless software development as far as the eye can see.

[-] rook@awful.systems 45 points 2 months ago

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

[-] rook@awful.systems 36 points 6 months ago

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

[-] rook@awful.systems 24 points 6 months ago

I might be the only person here who thinks that the upcoming quantum bubble has the potential to deliver useful things (but boring useful things, and so harder to build hype on) but stuff like this particularly irritates me:

https://quantumai.google/

Quantum fucking ai? Motherfucker,

  • You don’t have ai, you have a chatbot
  • You don’t have a quantum computer, you have a tech demo for a single chip
  • Even if you had both of those things, you wouldn’t have “quantum ai”
  • if you have a very specialist and probably wallet-vaporisingly expensive quantum computer, why the hell would anyone want to glue an idiot chatbot to it, instead of putting it in the hands of competent experts who could actually do useful stuff with it?

Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.

[-] rook@awful.systems 25 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

[-] rook@awful.systems 23 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:

We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we're forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs... and one in particular.

The average Founder CEO.

Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:

  • They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
  • They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
  • They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they're trying to sell you.
  • They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
  • They contradict themselves, pretending they aren't.
  • They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don't take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
  • They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
  • They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
  • They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
  • They're very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
[-] rook@awful.systems 84 points 11 months ago

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

[-] rook@awful.systems 24 points 1 year ago

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

[-] rook@awful.systems 31 points 1 year ago

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.

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rook

joined 2 years ago