TechTakes

2279 readers
173 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
dgerard@awful.systems
listing: all - local
226
24
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th June 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
114 comments fedilink
 
 

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. Also, happy Pride :3)

227
14
Business Insider layoffs as traffic drops — but publisher Axel Springer says AI will fix it! (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
0 comments fedilink
 
 

video, podcast

228
73
ChatGPT o3 found a Linux Kernel vulnerability. "The future" has an 8% success rate, and a 28% chance of false positives. (sean.heelan.io)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/techtakes@awful.systems
10 comments fedilink
 
 

This blog post has been reported on and distorted by a lot of tech news sites using it to wax delusional about AI's future role in vulnerability detection.

But they all gloss over the critical bit: in fairly ideal circumstances where the AI was being directed to the vuln, it had only an 8% success rate, and a whopping 28% false positive rate!

229
108
Microsoft and AI: spending billions to make millions (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
16 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

230
26
1970s AI bros (incl McCarthy) whining about the inventor of ELIZA telling them to gfy (dl.acm.org)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
19 comments fedilink
231
25
The UK will totally replace two-thirds of junior civil servants with AI chatbots, says the chatbot (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
5 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

232
42
Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
50 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

233
24
Google takes AI propaganda to the movies (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
15 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

234
9
Telstra embraces AI — with Accenture (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

235
62
Firing people for AI: not going so well (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
10 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

236
27
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st June 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
125 comments fedilink
 
 

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.)

237
68
AI resorts to robot blackmail! — because Anthropic asked for a story of robot blackmail (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
6 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

238
27
AI coding bot allows prompt injection with a pull request (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
3 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

239
40
AI power and water use is through the roof, and 80–90% is each query (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
4 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

240
56
Google: “after billions of dollars spent, we found a brilliant and innovative way to monetize AI! You’ll never guess what it is!!!” (techcrunch.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
13 comments fedilink
 
 

Take that, Saltman! Bet you never thought it was possible!

241
53
ChatGPT guessed this guys Dad's name. (infosec.pub)
submitted 5 months ago by Irelephant@lemm.ee to c/techtakes@awful.systems
11 comments fedilink
 
 

TranscriptA news.ycombinator.com screenshot. It has two comments. The first reads: "I told ChatGPT my mom's name the day my account got persistent memory, last april. I also told it to figure out my dad's name. Once a month or so I would ask it my mom and dad's name. By november it had figured out my dad's name. https://x.com/kenwarner/status/1859637611595214888" It has a reply saying "Unfortunately I feel like the fact that your dad's name is the same as yours somewhat diminishes that accomplishment.".

242
108
You can’t feed generative AI on ‘bad’ data then filter it for only ‘good’ data (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
57 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

243
34
UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy Instead (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
7 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

244
52
eating our own dogshit (old.reddit.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
36 comments fedilink
245
134
GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
25 comments fedilink
 
 

Video version

246
58
Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books (arstechnica.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by o7___o7@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
8 comments fedilink
 
 

This is peak laziness. It seems that the reading list's author used autoplag to extrude the entire 60 page supplemental insert. The author also super-promises this has never happened before.

247
18
DEFRA and Natural England creates unusably wrong peat map — with AI! (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

video version

248
17
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th May 2025 (awful.systems)
submitted 5 months ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
171 comments fedilink
 
 

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.)

249
66
Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor Anthropic (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
14 comments fedilink
 
 

Video version

Podcast version if you hate pictures

250
46
How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data (pivot-to-ai.com)
submitted 5 months ago by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 
 

Video version

view more: ‹ prev next ›