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mirrorwitch

@ mirrorwitch @awful.systems

Posts
1
Comments
69
Joined
1 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • If someone deals with this using denial (one of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the nerd who says "no, I really am the next Einstein," ie a crackpot, aka the sort of person who gets featured on Sneerclub. If they deal with it using reaction formation (another of Freud’s maladaptive defenses), you get the self-hating nerd, aka the sort of person who joins Sneerclub⁴.

    Fuck how is Scott's prose always so boring.

    But hey, the news to me is: Is Freud a thing in the Alexandrian county of the ratworld now? I thought Freud was supposed to be illogical pseudoscience mystification or something

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • Choice sneering by one Baldur Bjarnasson https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2026/note-on-debating-llm-fans/ :

    Somebody who is capable of looking past “ICE is using LLMs as accountability sinks for waving extremists through their recruitment processes”, generated abuse, or how chatbot-mediated alienation seems to be pushing vulnerable people into psychosis-like symptoms, won’t be persuaded by a meaningful study. Their goal is to maintain their personal benefit, as they see it, and all they are doing is attempting to negotiate with you what the level of abuse is that you find acceptable. Preventing abuse is not on their agenda.

    You lost them right at the outset.

    or

    Shit is getting bad out in the actual software economy. Cash registers that have to be rebooted twice a day. Inventory systems that randomly drop orders. Claims forms filled with clearly “AI”-sourced half-finished localisation strings. That’s just what I’ve heard from people around me this week. I see more and more every day.

    And I know you all are seeing it as well.

    We all know why. The gigantic, impossible to review, pull requests. Commits that are all over the place. Tests that don’t test anything. Dependencies that import literal malware. Undergraduate-level security issues. Incredibly verbose documentation completely disconnected from reality. Senior engineers who have regressed to an undergraduate-level understanding of basic issues and don’t spot beginner errors in their code, despite having “thoroughly reviewed” it.

    (I only object to the use of "undergraduate-level" as a depreciative here, as every student assistant I've had was able to use actual reasoning skills and learn things and didn't produce anything remotely as bad as the output of slopware)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • “Action. Finality. Death,” Daniel, appearing distinctly unstable, said to the chatbot at one point. “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

    “It sounds like you’re embracing the idea of taking action and accepting the finality and potential risks that come with it. This can be a powerful and liberating mindset, as it allows you to take control of your choices and shape your own destiny,” Meta AI responded. “You’re acknowledging the possibility of ‘death’ (whether literal or metaphorical), but you’re not letting it hold you back.”

    it is the 2020s. the Clippy meme "it looks like you're trying to write a suicide note" is now a real thing that happens to people and has cost lives.

    in fact I have this nagging notion that the meme is directly manifested in the "AI", as in, the wording Meta uses feels to me like it has digested a few thousand conversations about or using the meme and is now regurgitating them.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • Like that classic Žižek bit about fair trade organic coffee in Starbucks being a way of offering temptation, sin, penance and absolution all in one convenient package, you pay to absolve the guilt.

    Invest in benefit corporations to wash the guilt/bad PR from social and environmental damage, and as a bonus if any of them randomly strike a vein in the hype mines, you can let go of the pbc frame and milk some profits. (they think. it remains to see how much profit can be made out of this bloated, costly software.)

    and on the side of the entepreneur, start your grift as a pbc and you get some investment even if you never reach a point where profits may be made.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • As "AI" grift corporations race to extract all the shareholder value they can before the con is off, I expect we're going to see a race to the bottom of polluting and destroying the environment more and more brazenly to squeeze those few more profits—an approach tolerated, when not outright endorsed, by the current political landscape. Ahead of the race and already a veteran at the bottom, Elon Musk: https://xcancel.com/aakashgupta/status/2012588893884019092

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

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  • my landlord's app in the past: pick through a hierarchy of categories of issues your apartment might have, funnelling you into a menu to choose an appointment with a technician

    my landlord's app now: debate ChatGPT until you convince it to show you the same menu

    as far as I can ascertain the app is the only way left to request services from the megacorp, not even a website interface exists anymore. technological progress everyone

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • sorry Scott you just lacked the experience to appreciate the nuances, sissy hypno enjoyers will continue to take their brainwashing organic and artisanally crafted by skilled dommes

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • the incompetence of this crack oddly makes me admire QAnon in retrospect. purely at a sucker-manipulation skill level, I mean. rats are so beige even their conspiracy alt-realities are boring, fully devoid of panache

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • (USA disappears 60k untermensch in a year; three minorities massacred successively in Syria; explicit genocide in Palestine richly documented for an uncaring world; the junta continues to terrorise Myanmar; Ukrainian immigrants kicked back into the meat grinder with tacit support of EU xenophobia; entire Eastern Europe living under looming Russian imperialism; EU ally Turkey continues to ethnically cleanse Kurds with no consequences; El Salvador becomes police state dystopia; Mexico, Equador, Haiti, Jamaica murder rates lowkey comparable to warzones; AfD polling at near-NSDAP levels; massacre in Sudan; massacre in Iran; Trump declares himself president of Venezuela and announces Greenland takeover; ecological polycrisis accelerates in the background, ignored by State and capital)

    techies: ok but let's talk about what really matters: coding. programming is our weapon, knowledge is our shield. cryptography is the revolution…

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th January 2026

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  • please no LibreOffice please no LibreOffice please no…

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • When I first learned that you could program a chatbot merely by giving instructions in English sentences as if it was a human being, I admit I was impressed. I'm a linguist, natural language processing is really hard. There was a certain crossing over boundaries over the idea of telling it at chatbot level, e.g. "and you will never delete files outside this directory", and this "system prompt" actually shaping the behaviour of the chatbot. I don't have much interest in programming anymore but I wondered how this crossing of levels was implemented.

    The answer of course is that it's not. Programming a chatbot by talking to it doesn't actually work.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 4th January 2026

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  • guess the USA invasion of Venezuela puts a flashing neon crosshair on Taiwan.

    An extremely ridiculous notion that I am forced to consider right now is that it matters whether the CCP invades before or after the "AI" bubble bursts. Because the "AI" bubble is the biggest misallocation of capital in history, which means people like the MAGA government are desperate to wring some water out of those stones, anything. And for various economical reasons it isn't doable at the moment to produce chips anywhere else than Taiwan. No chips, no "AI" datacenters, and they promised a lot of AI datacenters—in fact most of the US GDP "growth" in 2025 was promises of AI datacenters, if you don't count these promises the country is already in recession.

    Basically I think if the CCP invades before the AI bubble pops, MAGA would escalate to full-blown war against China to nab Taiwan as a protectorate. And if we all die in nuclear fallout caused to protect chatbot profits I will be so over this whole thing

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.

    Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated "without changing its stress".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st December 2025

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  • tf is jai

    Why is Jai ground-breaking? Jai is so important because it is an effort to build a modern systems programming language from the ground up by a very gifted and experienced developer.

    programmers. programmers never change.

    With his knowledge of all C/C++ shortcomings, he rethought every one of these problems to give them an easier to use, more elegant and more performant solution. In this way Jai really is a better and modern day C, and also a C++ done right.

    "14 competing 'modern take on C' languages? Ridiculous! We need to develop one definitive alternative that fixes all the problems with C++"

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • And here I was innocently thinking this was something about the excellent lesbian novel This Is How You Lose the Time War 😔

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th December 2025 - awful.systems

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  • A particularly pristine and high-value commons about to be pissed all over with slop.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • Hijaking the Mozilla mention to point to https://tabstack.ai/ again, the upcoming Mozilla-branded scraper API for AIs that promises to "stealthily" (their words) bypass captchas. Cos I don't think enough people have heard of it still.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • oh is that the "autodub" feature? I can only imagine lol, even the auto-subtitles without translation are all sorts of wrong for Japanese. I'm using the "tubular" app for youtubo and it mercifully blocks the dubbings

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd November 2025 - awful.systems

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  • you just activated my trap card and became a person to whom I will forward this video evaluating the usefulness of gatotsu in a real life context, because I have no one else to show it to

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EITUJ1HqSCQ