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mirrorwitch

@ mirrorwitch @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
198
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • "Up to 7 billion" over a period of 10 years can hardly dig Oracle out of the hole it has dug itself into, though...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • It's as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, "we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we're cooked" to "oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!"

    Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn't collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it's kind of a big deal

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • "AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle"https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ai-spending-spree-hits-600b-as-oracle-fires-21000-employees-to-fund-boom/ar-AA28vWuD

    "Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years" "Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months"https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-113002772.html

    It's going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn't it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle.

    "In short, Oracle's 65% decline is historic, but the stock's future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow"

    well good luck with that, Oracle! :D

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • First impressions on this because I don't have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

    • Who would win: 1 presumably lesbian orc, or a non-evil, not particularly terrifying cow
    • I like what the artist did with visual storytelling here: Goma confused Sanctuary with the cow because of his horns, and afterwards she still threatened Sanctuary, for the same reason she threatened the cow: she's treating him as meat. Alas, Sanctuary utterly defeats her, in the same way that the cow did: by caring about her state and not responding to her violence at all.
    • What Sanctuary did by force-kidnessing her with the basket of squash is actually a very effective deescalation technique you can use yourself, too. It's something salespeople do to manipulate others. Due to some quirk of human psychology, we almost reflexively feel more friendly towards someone we helped. Not someone who helps us, somebody we do a favour for. Subconscious probably goes "if I decided to do a favour for this guy he must be an ally; otherwise I wouldn't be helping him, now would I", which bypasses the guards of "he's only helping me because he wants something". Thus if you want to defuse someone's hostility, ask them a favour—something genuinely helpful and that they are able to do, and in a way where it's awkward for them to refuse.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th July 2026

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  • Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.

    if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:

    • Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published in audio as podcasts, it's like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
    • The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
    • The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
    • The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
    • Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith's Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it's downright uncomfortable.
    • A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
    • This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it's a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
    • The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
    • This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden plant utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload hypertech cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they're both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026

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  • lol at least the gringos are going to explode themselves and stop bothering the third world—

    To avoid U.S. regulatory burdens, the company began working on deploying a test reactor in the Philippines.

    ah yes of course

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • I never understand how these things aren't simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes there's cameras and GPS locators etc. but there's ways around that, it's not that hard...

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026

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  • ponzi scheme capitalists: and we're going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore

    me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody

    ponzi scheme capitalists: we're also going to hoard all SSDs

    me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books

    ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours

    me: ｮﾟДﾟ)o

    https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 14th June 2026

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  • after calling the con about a super hacker AI the "mythos", now they're calling the next spiel "fable"? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • don't give them ideas

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn't destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • slop code in rsync timeline Ψ(･ω･ )Ψ

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it's called a sex club.

    Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, "hey wanna hear me sing?" The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.

    (This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it's because these men are not really trying to have sex, they're trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 31st May 2026

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  • Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!

    https://www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Duolingo is dying celebratory thread

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Wireborn husbands, ELIZA effect, Clippy, empathy (ramble)

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google

    wordsmith.social /elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    A depressed rant on my acceptance stage of living post-gen-"AI"

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    The broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbot

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems

    Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo

    nanowrimo.zendesk.com /hc/en-us/articles/29933455931412-What-is-NaNoWriMo-s-position-on-Artificial-Intelligence-AI